On—drakon [I Am Dragon] (2015)

(On Cable TV, June 2021) I’m normally a sympathetic audience when it comes to films that go for visual impact. I am Dragon, from Russia, heads into a fantastic past in order to deliver a romance between human girl and dragon boy, spending far more time on images than on words. The story is threadbare enough to bring to mind the Twilight series — once again, a teenage girl falling for a bad boy with a monstrous identity, and the rest of the film adjusting in consequence. Director Indar Dzhendubaev is clearly more interested in the visual aspects of the film — the 110 minutes running time would be about half its length if it focused on efficient storytelling, as something like twenty of those minutes would simply be slow-motion footage run at normal speed. To be fair, the images are frequently excellent: The dragon’s lair (set inside the skyscraper-sized skeleton of a long-dead dragon ancestor) is magnificent, and the film occasionally pops with far more colours than you’d expect from the snowbound opening. There’s a sumptuous quality to the near-omnipresent special effects, and the craft in which the images are presented can be impressive. Alas, little of I Am Dragon is supported by an interesting script. You could write the plot summary on a napkin, which is not necessarily a problem. The lack of narrative tension, on the other hand, is a bigger problem — there are very few surprises here (with even the plot turns being predictable), and the film becomes both more predictable and less suspenseful as it goes on. The last fifteen minutes of the film are pretty much foregone and don’t end on anything feeling like a climax. The romance is particularly disappointing in that there are very few stakes for the heroine: she likes dragon-boy more than human-boy, but human-boy is so devoid of any qualities, good or even bad, that it doesn’t feel like much of a choice. Overstaying its welcome by at least an hour, I Am Dragon is the kind of film where you find yourself muttering to speed it up: we all know what’s going to happen next, so let’s get on with it. But it doesn’t, and since the visual aspect of the film also gets less impressive throughout the third act, the weak ending dissipates much of the film’s impact. A shorter length, snappier pacing and a surprise or two toward the end would have helped tremendously. It still looks good… but much of it feels wasted.