Having watched all the Dragonheart movies so far, the ranking for me goes like this now:
1. Dragonheart
2. Dragonheart 3: The Sorcerer's Curse
3. Dragonheart (4): Battle for the Heartfire
4. Dragonheart (2): A New Beginning
5. Dragonheart (5): Vengeance.
The CGI is fantastic in this movie and trumps the first even. (Alright it's fantastic by Dragonheart standards). I was genuinely surprised by how good the dragon and various spells and effects looked, heartfire and all. The dragon gets a lot of screen time in this movie too, which is very welcome.
This also means a lot of the budget went on said CGI. But I'm glad for that. The set pieces and costumes were also good, but scale was often a bit out, sometimes a town looks massive and there seem to be maybe 15 inhabitants in total. They should've used the CGI for extra people maybe.. -1 star
The story, at its core, is quite engaging. A tale of twins marked at birth, unbeknownst to the dragon they're bonded to.
The writing, on the other hand is very unpredictable in quality. It actually has very good moments, then suddenly just becomes below-average for a time, then peaks again. No joke, there are some good lines in this movie. But then the writers take a couple days off. -1 star
The dragon, Drago, is written well and Patrick Stewart's voice is just great. The second best dragon in the series I'd say. Now the writers did have trouble keeping Drago a dragon. There are points in the movie where you'd think he was a man from how clumsy he is or how he loses a fight. It's very weird... but thankfully like the rest of the story, he has his strong moments to make up for it. -1 star
The feminism half-way through the movie slows it to a crawl and feels like it does make some form of sense with the story, so maybe if it was done with a bit more humour and wasn't so baked into the main story, it could've worked. -1 star.
The music is alright. It's pretty sparse and suddenly appears out of nowhere here and there, but it's good enough.
Overall, an enjoyable movie for Dragonheart fans, for others, it depends on whether or not you can stomach some bad dialogue here and there. There are good moments to be had.
