A good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really eager to watch this flick. Indeed, I always thought that the classic animated version was one of the most overrated movies ever so I couldn’t care less for a live-action version. Furthermore, Disney’s trend to adapt their classic animated features, even if they have been usually really successful, has been mostly irritating and frustrating and I guess it was only a matter of time before other studios would do the same thing. However, Nick, my step-son, was really eager to see it so he convinced me to give it a try. So, with this in mind, I have some rather low expectations but, eventually, I have to admit that I actually did enjoy the damned thing after all, in fact, I even enjoyed it more than the animated version. At last, I finally understood why it was so popular. Basically, it is actually a really solid story and Hiccup was/is such an inspiring character. Sure, I understand that it was already the case with the original version but I guess what bothered me at the time was that, because it was animated, it all felt too cute and goofy for my taste. By keeping the design of all the dragons, they still kept this childish vibe which will certainly allow them to score high at the box-office but this vibe definitely tone down the epic aspect of this actually solid material. And, indeed, beside the cute dragons, because it was not animated anymore, there was something darker, more visceral, about this Viking world. It finally felt quite epic and, when Hiccup started to fly with Toothless, I was pretty much sold. Mason Thames was also a perfect choice to play the lead and he was really solid. It was also pretty cool that Gerard Butler played the same character as he was basically born to play such characters. Nico Parker was also quite charismatic but, to be honest, she didn’t really nail it. Indeed, she should have been blown away by this kid flying on the most mysterious dragon that ever lived but I didn’t feel that. The ending also still didn’t really work. Sure, on one hand, it was pretty cool to see Hiccup defeating the biggest dragon that they ever saw during some epic battle making his legend even more awesome than it already was. However, on the other hand, the whole point of this character was that, instead of killing dragons, his thing was to become friends with his worst enemy which was just so inspiring, so, having him killing a dragon after all was actually rather disappointing. Finally, to see pretty much all the characters being able to ride some dragon with no training whatsoever was rather lame, it was again some other annoying cute touch, and it actually vastly contradicted the title. Anyway, to conclude, I have to admit that it turned out to be better than I expected and it is actually worth a look though.