There Be Dragons

Dragons is more erratic than epic1starGo to showtimes

PETER HARTLAUB, San Francisco Chronicle

Published
5:30 am CDT, Thursday, May 5, 2011

There Be Dragons would have been right at home in 1986.

That was the last gasp for David Lean-style filmmaking, when casts of thousands could still find work. Director Roland Joffé was comfortable directing historical epics — earning Academy Award nominations for The Mission and The Killing Fields - until the genre pretty much disappeared and his name started showing up on projects such as Super Mario Bros.

Dragons may have seemed less out of place three decades ago, but it would have been a bad movie then as well. It's filled with clumsy transitions and erratic performances, and tied together by an awkward framing device.

Joffé, who also wrote the screenplay, profiles Opus Dei founder Josemaría Escrivá. In Dragons, this real-life saint is juxtaposed with an invented antagonist: childhood friend Manolo, a spy who fights in the Spanish Civil War.

The idea of profiling a modern-day saint is interesting, and after The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei may have been due for a less damning treatment. (Members of the Catholic group helped produce Dragons.) But the relationship between Manolo and Josemarí a is less significant to the plot as time passes, and the narrative becomes adrift. Wes Bentley, as Manolo, and Olga Kurylenko, as a Hungarian woman fighting in the war, are ineffective, in part due to the overwrought writing and in part due to a strange exaggerated intensity that they bring to the roles.

At least the war scenes are well-staged, jolting the picture back to life on multiple occasions. Clearly, Joffé still has a touch for grand moments.