If you were of cinema-going age in the early 2000s, you know it was a time for dramatic beginnings. The Rock had just started his movie career with The Scorpion King. The age of the franchise was upon us with both Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter coming in hot. Resident Evil’s first movie came out and while it was not great, it showed that you can make a video game movie and not flush money down the toilet. The concrete of what we now know as film skyscrapers was being poured all around us. One of the golden nuggets embedded in that foundation is Reign of Fire. Matthew McConnaughey, who was mostly a rom-com guy at the time, shaved his head, grew a beard, and packed on 25 pounds of lean meat…to make a movie about...wait for it….
SKYDIVING DRAGON HUNTERS. I am not shitting you.
McConaughey teamed up with pre-Batman Christian Bale, and pre-Leonidas Gerard Butler and growled his way into a post-apocalyptic future full of fire-breathing menace. You could not get these three guys into a movie together anymore without half a billion dollars at your disposal. The whole movie cost 60 million dollars.
This movie kicks off with Bale and Butler performing a 2 man stage play of The Empire Strikes Back. After the climactic finale, Bale tells a bunch of orphans that he wrote it. The kid’s reactions to the play… are priceless. They are all of us watching Empire. It only gets better from there.
The movie quickly turns into Moby Dick, if Herman Melville were a coke-addled 13-year-old. McConaughey EATS up the screen as Van Zant. He wears a dragon tooth necklace over a winter coat that doesn’t have sleeves. He shows up driving a tank, that he basically just uses as a station wagon, because at no time during the film is it used to hunt dragons. It sounds ridiculous, but credit where it’s due, McConaughey sells the insanity of it with a growling emotion that sucks you in. He takes Van Zant from maniacally screaming with a battle axe to a near tears speech about his fallen soldiers in less than 3 minutes of screen time. The CGI and dragon design are pretty flawless and hold up remarkably well. You can feel the blueprint for Game of Thrones dragons being drawn up in front of you.
