Review: Reign of Fire

The film’s scares are genuinely terrifying and deliriously unironic.

Reign of Fire
Photo: Touchstone Pictures

In Reign of Fire, the world goes to shit soon after a hibernating dragon emerges from London’s “asshole.” Years later, a group of ashen Brits led by the aptly named Quinn Abercromby (a muscley Christian Bale) are paid a visit by a group of rogue American warriors commanded by cigar-muncher Denton Van San (a thoroughly disgusting Matthew McConaughey). Director Rob Bowman puts the ash machine to good use here though he’s far more successfu0l at evoking the film’s isolative, post-apocalyptic milieu via gently rolling hills as buffers against fire-breathing beasts. The film’s funniest (read: scariest) gag tips its hat at spoken history when Bale’s Abercromy reenacts a Star Wars father/son moment for his community of impressionable babes, suggesting that Lucas’s pop mythos is the roach set to survive our own global annihilation. Less dumb than shamelessly simple, Reign of Fire’s ideological implications (its alternative thoughts on food gathering and child rearing recall B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two) have been seemingly trimmed for efficiency’s sake. No matter, the film’s scares are genuinely terrifying and deliriously unironic (no peek-a-boo dragon attacks to be found anywhere). Audiences used to novelty scares will surely be disappointed by the genuinely anti-climatic finale though the failure of the film’s second half has less to do with befuddled expectations than Bowman’s dubious time lapses. That the film works best when its dragons are off-screen says more about Bowman’s impressive use of landscape as terror mechanism than the quality of the perfectly serviceable CGI effects. The story is all-cheese but the film’s set pieces (see the killer skydiving sequence) more than deliver, as does McConaughey. Overacting his heart out, he’s seemingly convinced that when the world’s going to shit you might as well go with it.

Score: 
 Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale, Izabella Scorupco, Gerard Butler, Randall Carlton, Doug Cockle, Maree Duffy, Duncan Keegan  Director: Rob Bowman  Screenwriter: Greg Chabot, Matt Greenberg, Kevin Peterka  Distributor: Buena Vista Pictures  Running Time: 102 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2002  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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