Premise - It's 2020 and 25 years ago a dragon egg was uncovered from the London underground. The dragon breed quickly and before long London was destroyed and the rest of the world followed quickly afterwards. Quinn (Christian Bale), a survivor of the original attack is now the leader of a small band of humans in Northumberland. When American dragon hunter Van Zan (Mathew McConaughey) turns up at Quinn's encampment, Quinn must decide if he wants to stay put, or go onto London and try and destroy the dragons once and for all. I remember seeing the promotional material for Reign of Fire in the early spring and becoming quite excited. The trailer and in particular the poster suggested massive battles over a crumbling London. Helicopters pitted against dragons, man fighting with his dying breath to overturn the dragon scourge. An action packed movie, with heroes to cheer for and villains to boo. Oh dear, what happened? What we have here is a film with one major action sequence, a couple of minor skirmishes that pretend to be action sequences, a pair of unappealing main characters and nothing close to massive battles between helicopters and dragons. I feel cheated, played for a fool by some clever advertising. Reign of Fire isn't a complete disaster; it has a fair bit going for it, just not enough. For a start the dragon effects are very impressive. The dragons take their sweet time appearing though, fleeting quickly past and disappearing into the fog in the early parts of the film. This serves to build a smattering of tension in the opening skirmishes. It's during the films most impressive sequence that we see the dragons in their full glory for the first time. The sequence involves a group of Americans jumping out of a helicopter to try and catch the dragon in a net. It's a very fast paced scene and is actually quite exciting. We get to see the dragons in full effect here, as swift, efficient killing machines. They're fast, agile, smart and don't mess about. It really is an excellent sequence and saves the film from being a complete waste of time. It's pretty much downhill from this point on as we have more unexplainable pissing contests between the two leads before the underwhelming finale. Whilst I'm on the subject of the leads I have to say that I like both McConaughey and Bale, but they are all wrong here. McConaughey comes of the better of the two; his cigar chomping bad-ass at least resembles a hero of sorts, albeit an anti-hero. Bale on the other hand is just a whiny git who has an unprecedented change of heart 20 minutes before the end of the film. As I said I like Bale, I think I'm the only person on the planet to like 'Velvet Goldmine' and he was just stunning in 'American Psycho', but this is a disaster area for him. The accent, the ridiculous facial hair (which seems to be in vogue in 2020) and the whiny attitude are all wrong. Director Rob 'X-Files the Movie' Bowman handles the handful of action scenes competently, but everything grinds to halt whilst Quinn and Van Zan argue for a bit and Izabella Scorupco stands around looking grubby and doing little else. The look of the film is suitably post apocalyptic, but sometimes the film can look like a cheap British sci-fi show, all gravel pits and debris, like a Doctor Who episode. As I need to discuss some plot points to detail the rest of the problems I had with the film here's a spoiler space > SPOILER SPACE>>>>> The story by Gregg Chabot and Kevin Peterka holds little or no water, plot holes are littered all over the place. How in a post apocalyptic society does Van Zan and his rag tag group of soldiers have enough fuel to run a helicopter continuously? Where are they getting all the ammunition from? If these dragons only have one male for the entire planet doesn't he get tired? While I’m on about it, one male? For the millions of dragons on the planet, one fricken male? I don’t think so. And after this one male is killed why aren't all the females pissed off? Do they just roll over and die? None of this is explained. Why does Quinn change from a whiny bitch who wants to stay and grow crops to a man who wants to go into the heart of dragons nest with only two other people in the space of 20 minutes? Not only that, but one of these 3 people is the man that lead his community to its destruction! It's ludicrous nonsense. Sure, you need to suspend belief, it is a dragon movie after all, but you have to draw the line somewhere! I was disappointed enough by Reign of Fire because I expected so much more, but what I did get is sup-bar and full of more plot holes than block of Dutch cheese.

4/10 for Reign of Fire. Poster Quote - Bring the extinguisher.