Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon (2013)

Influx Magazine

Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon

A Lame Duck, Creature Feature…

If you can cast your minds back to that brilliant film, The Silence of the Lambs, when Hannibal Lecter was wired up to that machine that measured his heart rate as he bit off the nurses tongue, and it hardly registered him showing any emotion? Well, if I was wired up to the exact same machine while watchingLegendary: Tomb of the Dragon, the effect would be identical. In fact, it would probably show that I had flatlined, it was so uninteresting. The characters had no charisma and as for the script; the less said about that the better. Two words kept creeping in to my thoughts throughout the entirety of this movie. The first word was “contrived.” The second word had two syllables, the first of which was “bull.”

Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon

Directed by
Eric Styles

Cast
Scott Adkins, Dolph Lundgren, Yi Huang

Release Date
2014

Ed’s Grade: D

Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon tells the tale of two hunters who go after creatures thought to be extinct, mythical or extremely rare. One is the big bad white hunter, Harker (Dolph Lundgren), after only the glory of the kill, and the other is the kindly protector of all species, Travis (Scott Adkins) who only wants to capture animals for scientific study. They go after a giant bear together with a small team to assist them but one of the group is killed and Travis is plagued by a lawsuit and retires. He’s coaxed back out on the field by video footage captured of a large creature in China where he gets his team back together to investigate the authenticity of the lizard.

Upon arrival in beautiful China, the team discover Harker has beaten them to all the sites where they need to be able to study where the creature was spotted and where it had recently killed, but he and his team start to investigate on their own and make better headway than big dumb Harker. Travis’ team are continually hampered by Harker and eventually, after much shenanigans, it leads to a showdown when its lair is uncovered and one group try to capture the beast and the other try to kill it.

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There were so many things wrong with Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon it’s hard to know where to begin, and even harder to know when to shut up, because the list would be rather lengthy. The good things about the film were the locations and the cinematography. As for the rest of the affair, it played rather like a Syfy TV movie with a slightly better budget than they would normally have, but not as well written (believe it or not) and in pointlessly glorious 3D.

Team Travis planned to use a large cylindrical cage to capture and hold the beast, which was also the very one they had planned to hold the giant bear in at the start, but anyone could clearly see it was far too small to hold either of the monsters. They simply wouldn’t fit; no way, no how. Team Harker are in possession of a detailed geological survey that clearly shows where the tunnel system is that has been how the giant lizard has been coming back and forth and anyone glimpsing the image could tell, but it’s only when Travis looks at the survey image and not big dumb Harker does it become obvious.

Lundgren’s Harker is reduced to a cardboard cutout thug, who does nothing more than play the dummy with a gun and has absolutely no real game plan. He’s only there to serve as the bad guy against Adkins’ good guy, Travis, who defends the creature no matter how many people it kills. There’s a scene when two boats are on the water and one is attacked by the beast, causing three of the people on board to fall in. What do they do? They splash about like idiots until our hero Travis leaps in after them one by one as the CGI beast swims about, instead of them swimming straight for one of the boats that are only a few feet away. There are too many examples of this type of action that had me almost throwing things at the screen in disgust. A very poor film indeed.

Review by Ed Blackadder, Lead Entertainment Writer