Awesomely Bad: Dragon Wars

Many apologies for the lateness of this installment of Awesomely Bad, but between indecision with which movie to review and the complete time-suck that World of Goo, which was on sale on Steam for $5 over the weekend, it just never happened. I actually had to watch two different movies to get one that even met my very low standards for a bad movie. First I watched Cannibal: The Music, which was Matt Stone and Trey Parker's (of South Park fame) first film. It quickly became obvious that it wasn't going to work because it was intentionally bad, and that seemed like cheating. Not to go in without back up, I fired up my alternate choice, Dragon Wars (or D-War as the trendy titles want me to call it)and felt more at home. D-War, however, isn't quite your average bad movie, I'm not even sure it's really all that bad. But not being one to give up, I present my Awesomely Bad review of Dragon Wars.

First off lets get a few things out of the way. After snitching on Cannibal for cheating at the bad movie game, I feel a bit hypocritical trying to pull of calling Dragon Wars a bad movie. It just doesn't fit all your typical criteria. First off, it had a staggering, for b-movies, budget of $32 Million (some further reading insinuates that the budget actually went as high as $70-ish Million). That budget actually bought them some pretty impressive special effects and high quality cameras. What it did not buy them was a very good story or quality acting, so I'm going to consider it a high-end bad movie. On with the show.

Dragon Wars starts out with a prophecy. Yep, Hollywood still has a few prophecies that need movies. This prophecy is an old Korean legend about good and bad dragons, called Imoogi, and a source of power, the Yuh-Yi-Joo, instilled in a girl every 500 years. When the girl turns 20, the Yuh-Yi-Joo gets turned on and to retain the balance of good and evil, the girl along with the power she possesses must be sacrificed to the good Imuooi. Not happy with simply controlling the bad Imoogi, super bad-guy Buraki wants to possess the Yuh-Yi-Joo himself and unleash a 500 year reign of terror over the earth...or at least Korea. But Buraki doesn't just have the bad Imoogi on his side, he also has the Atrox Army - a group of fire breathing little dragons, a bunch Lord of the Rings Uruk-hai looking guys on little raptors, and these big walking sea cow looking things that have dual rocket launchers on their back. Why these big ugly bastards have steam punk looking rocket launchers in ancient Korea, I have no idea. With the bad Imoogi and his Atrox Army, which the name is never explained, Buraki takes over the village hiding the Yuh-Yi-Joo and almost captures her until she commit suicide. Why did she commit suicide instead of commit suicide and give her glowy goodness to the good Imoogi? Because she fell in love with her guardian and that makes it tragic, that's why!

Now flash forward 500 years to modern Los Angeles and we see vaguely Asian news reporter Ethan Kendrick who stumbles across the scene of a small disaster and just happens to see a giant dragon scale, which fires off a flashback in which he's a little kid in a import/antique/pawn-shop of some sort where a white guy surrounded by tons of old Korean shit fakes a heart attack to get Ethan's dad to leave his kid with him so he can tell Ethan that he's chosen to protect the Yuh-Yi-Joo. Ethan's dad, being a good samaritan and obviously not concerned about pedophiles or his son in general, happily obliges. Old guy that should be Korean but is actually American actor Robert Forster conveys the ancient legacy to young Ethan, gives him this gnarly and obnoxiously large pendant that has no obvious function at this point, and tells the kid too young to understand anything more important than Saturday morning cartoons that he has a great destiny.

Any now we're back in the present where for no obvious reason, 20-something report Ethan Kendrick goes on a quest to find out who the Yuh-Yi-Joo armed with only three facts that not-Korean white guy from his flashback gave him: her name will be Sarah, she will be 19, and she has a birthmark that looks like a intricate dragon tattoo. To aid him in his search, token black guy Bruce (played by Craig Robinson from Pineapple Express and Zack and Miri Make a Porno) does all the leg work and does the news reporter equivalent of Googling and searches through his super awesome database of everyone in LA named Sarah. Throw in some convenient plot twists and he's able to narrow it down to THE Sarah that he KNOWS he has to save. At some point we also meet Sarah, but she is busy having a minor breakdown because she gets a bad feeling and blah-blah-blah she somehow knows she's got some destiny awaiting her. Oh yeah, and to prove the history is an endless cycle Ethan and Sarah fall in love..wait for it...wait for it...for no reason whatsoever.

Now I know all of that was rather boring and you may be wondering why I'm going into detail about the story, but I'm actually doing you a favor. Now you don't even have to watch the first 40 minutes of the movie. That's right, just fast forward it to where the bad dragon starts tearing shit up, because that's the only good part of the movie. For the next hour, Ethan and Sarah will run away from the bad Imoogi which seems to be able to outrun speeding traffic and Apache helicopters, but can't seem to catch up with two 20-something kids running through the street. While the bad Imoogi is ripping shit up, Buraki has summoned his Atrox Army in the middle of LA and they tear shit up too. The special effects are actually quite impressive. They're not quite Lord of the Rings quality, but they're better than most triple-A summer blockbusters. Through out the whole movie the bad Imoogi proves that it's a severe bad ass, all the while the good Imoogi is a big fucking pacifist pussy. You only see it during the opening where we get the goods on the legend, where it doesn't do a god damn thing to save all the villagers getting wiped out by the Atrox Army, and then it shows up at the very end, as with most things in the movie - for no obvious reason, to have the ultimate showdown with the bad Imoogi.

Final Verdict: For a Korean movie, there are a lot of relatively recognizable American actors. None of them are A-list leading guys and gals, but throughout the movie you will see lots of people that you won't know their name or what movie they're from, but you know you've seen them before. The special effects are actually quite good and help make the movie watchable,as does the decent cinematography, but the pointlessly convoluted back story that leads into the almost laughably bad paced chase that makes up the bulk of the movie bring it way down. What you get in the end is a well made bad movie that gets pulled down by the unbelievability of the story and the reactions of the main characters. There aren't any cheesy, over-the-top effects or ridiculous one-liners. This one is actually hard to rate. If I were a serious critic it would get a low-to-middling score, but I'm looking for bad movies and it just barely qualifies as one. I give it a 2.5/5 - it just half-asses it on any scale you look at.