It’s funny that the Koreans are so proud of this film and breaking on to the Hollywood scene. But what a disappointment!

D-War (as it is titled in Korea) or Dragon Wars (in the US) is a new movie by director Hyung Rae Shim (who has a history of doing commedy). This movie is gloriously awful! so forehead slappingly cheesy that I ended up half enjoying it.

The film centers around a Korean legend about how dragons are born from giant snake-gods.

The good thing about this movie was that it was short. 92 minutes actually felt longer, but thankfully this movie ends… but it’s still about 90 minutes too long. the Giant snake is not that badly done, but I think they used up their effects budget on the one shot of the Snake climbing the Liberty Building in LA.

For what little good that this movie had it was completely ruined by bad story telling, horrible character development and bad directing and disjointed editing.

The story telling was awful. It didn’t make much sense. It honestly felt like they took the original Korean Folk tale (which is interesting to anyone with any interest in Korean culture at all) threw it into a blender and then tried to Americanize it. It has too many plot holes and so many loose threads that I could have woven a Persian rug out of them.

Character development was weak. I simply didn’t care. The actors were wooden and their delivery of dialog was such that it felt like they were reading from a Cereal box. Most of this problem was in the writing, but the direction of the Actors was not great, and I felt myself not really caring that a Giant snake was eating everything in sight.

The Editing was so disjointed each scene felt very disconnected with the rest of the film. It was non-sequiter after non-sequiter, even when a scene felt like it was connected to the rest of the film it felt accidental. the film was funny in parts… but it didn’t seem like it was intended to have been funny.

Effects were not great. The huge battle sequence which should have looked like the battle scene from “The Two Towers” looked like they were ripped from a Computer game engine. don’t get we wrong… if it were a game it would have been very good…. but this was a movie.

This ended up being a Godzilla type of movie, but it didn’t feel like that was intended by the film-maker. If it were to have been a comedy, then it failed, it failed as a fantasy, and it failed as an action film. It was simply a bad film. I enjoyed the badness but I cannot reccomend it to anyone at all.