Whatever happened to Brenton Thwaites? For some reason that crossed my mind as this thoroughly entertaining fantasy adventure gets off to a rollicking start and keeps going. Now if you are the “Hagar”-esque Viking chief (Gerard Butler) expecting your son to take over as fearless dragon-chaser after you, why would you call him “Hiccup”? Might as well call him “Buttercup”? Anyway, that hapless lad (Mason Thames) maybe isn’t the most adept on the muscle front but cerebrally he has something of the Leonardo Da Vinci to him as he determines to set about devising a weapon that will tackle the most formidable of their foes - the “Night Fury”. Well, would you believe it - his contraption actually works, but instead of slaying the thing this young man decides that the decades of combat between the species has accomplished nothing, so he decides a bit of co-operation might be in order instead. Of course, he has to be fairly clandestine about this as his dad will go ape if he finds out and fellow, and competitive, student “Astrid” (Nico Parker) - on whom he has a terrible crush - might decide to take her axe to both him and his new friend. There are a few slight modifications from the animation (2010) but otherwise it largely sticks to the story with a lovely hammy effort from Butler, an enjoyably mischievous one from his multi-appendage sidekick “Gobber” (Nick Frost) and two solid performances from the leads. It’s Thames who really steals the show amongst the humans, with a cheeky and personable effort which must have been quite a task as he spent much of the filming dangling in front of a green screen. As to the visuals, they are great. A combination of dragons galore, huge scale pyrotechnics and loads of imagination immerses you into a story of family and friendship without even the vaguest hint of the moralising that often peppers this genre. They say that, aerodynamically, a bee ought never to be able to fly: well I think that could be said of almost all of the critters here as they dart about menacingly and colourfully for a couple of hours of what is really good fun. It’s well worth a cinema outing as the whole thing looks and sounds great on a big screen and dare I say it, I might quite like a sequel if they can keep the standard of storytelling up to that of the imagery.
