12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Fire dragons vs ice dragons, August 18, 2010
I honestly feel sorry for Pitof. The guy started off with such stylistic promise, but then he directed "Catwoman" and it was all downhill from there. And his latest fantasy foray is "Fire And Ice: The Dragon Chronicles," a movie that is quite good by the standards of SyFy/Sci-Fi original movies (Alert: now damning with faint praise!), but is still a massive stewpot of bad fantasy cliches.
Carpia is a happy, clean, Renaissance Faire kind of kingdom... until a giant dragon starts periodically visiting to burn everything. With the population starving (although everybody still looks pretty plump), Princess Louisa (Amy Ackers) sets out to find a legendary banished knight who is apparently the ONLY PERSON who can slay a dragon. Sadly, the guy has died and she has to deal with his money-grubbing son Gabriel (Tom Wisdom).
So how do you kill a fire dragon? Uh... apparently you sic an ice dragon on it, although it seems Gabriel's dad didn't do that. And of course, while they're fighting the good king of Carpia will clash at last with the evil king of a neighboring kingdom. Symbolism!
Let's see, we have a Han-Soloish hero, slimy advisor, wise and quirky mentor, spunky tomboy princess, perfect king, evil king, and sinister forest inhabited by malevolent savages? It feels like Pitof mined every single cliche he could come up with for "Fire and Ice," and just added water for INSTANT EPIC FANTASY MOVIE.
Even worse, the script has painful dialogue ("I'm expecting a hollow echo when I pierce your heart"), plot holes (these kingdoms are TINY), and some really bizarre moments (behold the Medieval Movie Projector!). And while Pitof does his best to cover the seams, it's pretty obvious this was a low-budget affair -- I mean, the forest people are wannabe ninjas wearing leaves and making whooping noises!
And the acting is generally pretty horrible. Most of the competent actors like Arnold Vosloo and Tom Wisdom give stiff flat performances; it seems like they're just waiting to get paid. As for poor Amy Ackers, she is handicapped by the fact that Princess Louisa is a blithering moron -- I mean, she hides from a dragon UNDER A WOODEN WAGON, then toddles away with a preteen on her back! AND she tells total strangers in a forest, "I'm the princess!" Apparently all that royal inbreeding has had an effect.
In fact, John Rhys-Davies is the only enjoyable performance, since he has all the best lines ("Money? We like money! I remember what it looks like!"). I just wish he were starring in something better.
So what is good about this movie? The exteriors are very nice (especially the castle), and the scenery is simply lovely . And the dragons are quite unique -- giant reptilian creatures with manta-ray wings that trail ice or fire wherever they fly, and have an egg between their eyes. Kinda cool, actually.
It's good for a SciFi/SyFy movie, but that's honestly not saying much. "Fire And Ice: The Dragon Chronicles" is a big soggy mass of cliches, in a simple plot that doesn't really do much.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Awful., June 24, 2010
This review is from: Fire & Ice: The Dragon Chronicles ( Fire & Ice ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Netherlands ] (DVD)
Fire & Ice (Pitof, 2008)
First, the good: Fire & Ice has, quite simply, the coolest damn dragons I have ever, bar none, seen in a fantasy movie.
Now, the bad: everything else. Pitof started out his career with the entertaining, if shallow, Chronicles of Vidocq, and has since been traversing a slippery downward slope that has landed him at this most mediocre of levels: directing Sci-Fi Channel Original Movies. How is it that you can come up with a cast of this caliber and still make a movie this awful?
Plot: a fire dragon has been ravaging a kingdom. In order to get rid of it, Gabriel (300's Tom Wisdom), the son of the last dragonslayer, along with his faithful assistant Sangmiel (John Rhys-Davies) and naive-but-spunky princess Luisa (Alias' Amy Acker), has to travel to the next kingdom over, swipe a dragon egg, and use it to awaken an ice dragon...and then hope the two of them will kill one another.
Now, those who have watched the movie (I'm not sure I've encountered anyone I'd call a "fan") seem to be divided on the dragons. This is because they don't look like one expects a dragon to look. (But then, neither do Eastern dragons...) They look more like giant manta rays that were in some way crossed with comets so that their particular element floats around them and trails them like a cloud. Okay, so it's not traditional. That doesn't mean it's not really, really cool. It's actually an original take on something, which is something this movie otherwise sadly lacks. It also lacks a workable script, any decent editing, competent cinematography, a decent soundtrack, and, most surprisingly, good acting. This is quite the cast here. (I didn't mention The Mummy's Arnold Vosloo or Children of Men's Oana Pellea, either.) Once again I find myself with evidence that a bad director can mess up a movie that otherwise seems like a surefire success. Watch the first few minutes to see the fire dragon, skip an hour, check out the big battle between the dragons, and ignore the rest. *
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