Studio: Paramount Pictures Genre: Fantasy •
Animated Street Date: January 15, 2008 Director: Will Meugniot Number of Discs: 1 MPAA Rating: PG-13 Cast: Lucy Lawless, Kiefer Sutherland, Michael Rosenbaum, Fred Tatasciore, Michelle Trachtenberg Running Time: 100 minutes Format: DVD Specs: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC Special Features: Original Test Animation, Initial Character Design Review: What is it about Dungeons and Dragons that's so hard about translating to the screen? You have a world filled with amazing possibilities and stories, and yet the only two successful attempts to bring tell it on screen have been a cheesy cartoon from the 80's and a TV movie of the week staring a very young Tom Hanks. It shouldn't be this hard nor should failing to bring it off look so tough either.
Anyway, this time around they went the animated route and mixed it with some CGI. The standard animation is really choppy and looks awful and the CGI stuff looks like it was done as some 12th grade school project. The effect is something like Technicolor vomit and it will annoy your eyes to watch it.
What’s worse is that they lined up some top notch voice talent and gave them to worst plot and dialog to work with, pretty sad when the combined powers of Jack Bauer, Lex Luthor, and Xena can't save this thing from crashing. Basically it’s the formula of "Let find the mystic artifacts protect the chosen one and stop the evil forces from taking over" plot.
There's just nothing here really that I can see to lure in new fans of D&D and not much to satisfy the hardcore fans. On the Brightside it’s not nearly as lame as that love action movie so they have made a tiny bit of progress if that says anything. Buy It Now: Rating:
