Las Vegas Weekly

Lord of the Wings

This shabby Rings ripoff has a generic story, wooden dialogue and none of that Jackson action

Tolkien's books spawned an entire subgenre of literature, but in film fantasy like this is much rarer, so Eragon looks even more like direct plagiarism without a legion of similarly derivative products to hide among. It's equal parts LOTR and Star Wars, with its fresh-faced farm boy Luke, er, Eragon (Ed Speleers, channeling early Mark Hamill blandness) discovering that he has been chosen to defeat an evil empire personified by an angry, snotty old dude (in this case, John Malkovich, no doubt paid handsomely for three scenes as the nasty king of the film's fantasy realm).

After finding and bonding with the world's last known free dragon (voiced in a rather inappropriately erotic fashion by Rachel Weisz), Eragon teams up with the poor man's Obi-Wan Kenobi, a local crank played by Jeremy Irons, forms a fellowship of the, um, dragon, and sets off to save the world, or at least make one incremental step along the process of saving the world, so as to have some sense of accomplishment but not actually do enough that the inevitable sequels seem unwarranted.

Visual effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier, whose name sounds like it ought to belong to a character in the film, makes an inauspicious directorial debut, predictably emphasizing effects over character and story, both of which are given a rather perfunctory treatment, and exhibiting an alarming over-reliance on sweeping aerial shots of people riding over mountains on horseback that are lifted wholesale from Jackson.

And then all of the wooden dialogue and generic hero-questing doesn't even lead to much of note, merely setting up a sequel that may never come to pass. If it does, though, it'll probably be able to blend in more easily with the coming onslaught of quickie fantasy epics.