Dean DeBlois’ live-action remake of his own 2010 animated film How to Train Your Dragon is one of the more unusual propositions in recent Hollywood memory: a director returning to faithfully reconstruct something he already built once, from the ground up, in a different medium. If you know the original well, you’ll find almost nothing here that surprises you. The story beats are identical, certain gags land in exactly the same places. Even specific shots feel lifted wholesale from the animated version, yet DeBlois has somehow padded the runtime by another thirty minutes with new material so seamlessly integrated that it becomes impossible to tell where the old ends and the new begins. Vikings despise dragons. Dragons despise Vikings. A misfit boy catches one. They become friends. Together they rescue everyone from themselves. The bones are the bones.
It’s easy to look at this and see naked commercial logic. Universal watching Disney’s live-action library print money and deciding it was time to see what was left in the Dreamworks vault before the next Jurassic sequel swallowed up every available screen. That cynicism isn’t entirely unwarranted. But the execution is disarming enough that it mostly dissolves on contact.
The effects work deserves a significant portion of the credit. Where too many of these adaptations have chased a misguided photorealism, stripping beloved characters of the expressiveness that made audiences love them in the first place, as Favreau’s The Lion King so memorably demonstrated, DeBlois takes the sensible route. The dragons here retain their essential cartoonish shapes and faces. They’re grounded just enough by texture and physicality to exist plausibly alongside real actors in real environments. It’s a sensible philosophy that extends beyond dragons. Fictional creatures aren’t obligated to follow the rules of biology, and demanding that they do tends to produce something neither convincingly real nor entertainingly fantastical. They’re allowed to just look good.
Gerard Butler, though, is the film’s genuine trump card. His career has moved through distinct phases with an almost structured peculiarity. The early years of solid work in forgettable films, the mid-period blockbuster run that swung wildly between genuinely entertaining and truly dreadful, and finally the current chapter, the counterprogramming era of Den of Thieves sequels and Has Fallen installments, which has proved unexpectedly rich territory for his specific brand of blunt, swarthy charisma. Here, playing Viking chieftain and reluctant father, he dials it back to something quieter and more vulnerable, and the result is one of his better screen performances in years. A scene in which he believes his awkward son has finally become the warrior he always hoped for is genuinely moving, uncomfortable and tender in equal measure, carrying the weight of a man who has raised a child alone and can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. It’s the kind of moment that, somehow, improves on what his voice work achieved in the original, even without Craig Ferguson’s comic energy to play against. Nick Frost fills that space adequately, if not memorably.
This is ultimately what separates Dragon from the more cynical entries in the live-action remake cycle. DeBlois doesn’t wink at the audience or signal awareness of the absurdity of his own project. He simply remakes the film he made, with obvious conviction that it was worth making again, and that sincerity is genuinely disarming even when it can’t disguise the commercial machinery underneath. Whether that justifies the exercise philosophically is a different question, one these films are structurally incapable of answering in their own favour. The ideal version of this situation involves studios betting that money on something new instead. But that’s not the world we’re operating in, and within the world we have, How to Train Your Dragon is a remake made with more care and craft than it had any obligation to show. The kids in the audience won’t think about any of this. They’ll just love the dragon, which is probably the most honest possible outcome.
