‘There’s no reason for this to exist’: Reviews of ‘How to Train Your Dragon,’ ‘Materialists,’ and ‘The Life of Chuck’

This week in theaters brings a wide variety of new releases to choose from for just about every discerning cinema goer. A new romantic drama, Materialists, focuses on a complicated love triangle with Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal. Then there is another live-action remake of a beloved animated film (but this time someone other than Disney is joining the bandwagon) with Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon. Finally, there’s a new Stephen King adaptation from Mike (Doctor Sleep) Flanagan, The Life of Chuck. But instead of monsters, it’s more interested in the heartbreaking minutia of an unexamined life.

I struggled with How to Train Your Dragon for several reasons, but two of them stick out the most. First, just like most of the rest of the live-action remakes, there’s no reason for this to exist. For a majority of the running time, How to Train Your Dragon is a near shot-for-shot remake of the animated film, which is still a damn classic. The animation is gorgeous, the pacing and direction near flawless, and the voice-acting is timeless. All this new one does is remind me that the old one exists and I would rather be watching it.

The next big issue is the casting. Yes, it’s wonderful seeing Gerard Butler inhabit the role he voiced in the cartoon and Nick Frost is perfect as Gobber, but the film is fundamentally broken with the casting of Mason Thames as Hiccup. Maybe it’s just me, but Jay Baruchel’s awkward rasp as Hiccup in the original animated trilogy is flawless and builds that character beautifully across the three films. No one else stood a chance playing him, but Thames in particular feels so contemporary as an actor and as a young man, that every time he is onscreen, the spell of the film was broken and I was no longer in a world of Vikings and dragons. He just looks like an actor waiting to check his phone.

Toothless the Dragon is still beautifully realized and there are flying sequences that are stunning to witness, but a live-action remake of an animated classic that’s only 15 years old feels just a little too cynical to me. These remakes need a reason to exist other than the studios shamelessly reaching into the financial cookie jar. Still, this version of How to Train Your Dragon is probably going to make all the money in the world, so maybe audiences are as much to blame as the Hollywood suits.

Materialists is being advertised as a romantic comedy starring the always weirdly reserved Dakota Johnson, the always charming Chris Evans, and the always thirst-trapping Pedro Pascal. Audiences might end up a bit disappointed, however, because, while there’s plenty of rom, there’s barely any com. This is the latest film from Celine Song, whose previous movie Past Lives is one of the most subtly powerful looks at the road not taken, and The Materialists is another sneakily profound look at modern love and what it takes from us.

Johnson plays a wildly successful matchmaker who meets a sweet, rich “unicorn” (Pascal) while still having unresolved feelings for her broke and struggling ex-boyfriend (Evans). That setup sounds like a film Jennifer Lopez or Kate Hudson would have starred in a decade ago, but under Song’s quietly devastating direction and achingly lonely screenplay, we have what amounts to a complete deconstruction of the romantic comedy and a bitingly pointed look at how hard it is to feel valued in a time where materialism can shape one’s own self-worth.

While Materialists doesn’t quite have the same rich textures of emotion as Past Lives, I still found myself deeply introspective once the film ended, and it re-contextualized how I viewed myself in a lot of ways. As someone who’s been single for quite some time, I struggle with understanding why I continually fail to find lasting love. The film realizes this about its audience and does such a lovely job at making viewers look at our cynical longings that it’s easy to miss the warm center that Song is trying to share: that each of us are individually valued in different ways and that the hope of someone discovering that value is what keeps us going. I’m not sure whether that’s cynical hope or brutal optimism, but Materialists has more to say about humanity than I was ready for.

Finally, The Life of Chuck takes a non-linear look at a life from childhood to deathbed and how the Walt Whitman poem Song of Myself and its immortal line about humanity containing multitudes is more than a cliche or a platitude, but something we’re all worthy of realizing about ourselves before we die.

Cynical folk will watch The Life of Chuck and find it overly sentimental, while the gentle optimist might find the darkness at its center (as could only be conjured by Stephen King) a bit too much to be palatable. While ultimately existing as a statement about what it means to be alive, to love and be loved in return, the magic of this movie is going to hit everyone just the slightest bit differently. Whether you find it life-affirming and profound or solipsistic and obvious… that says more about who you are as a person on the day you watched it than it does about the film itself.

The Life of Chuck worked on me. I found it spellbinding and the loveliest movie about what it means to be a human being since Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days. Yes, there is corn and cheese and ham and all the nouns and adjectives used to describe something that wears its weeping heart on its sleeve, but there’s also truth and it wouldn’t surprise me if The Life of Chuck ends up making a damn fine double feature with It’s a Wonderful Life a hundred years from now.

How to Train Your Dragon
Grade: C-

Materialists
Grade: B+

The Life of Chuck
Grade: A-