Dean DeBlois remakes his own animated film almost shot for shot, with real rock, real weather and a Toothless you could touch. The flying still works and Mason Thames is a fine Hiccup, but it is longer, slower and adds almost nothing the first one lacked.
Dean DeBlois co-directed the animated How to Train Your Dragon in 2010. Fifteen years on he has directed, written and produced it again, this time with actors, and he has kept the story, the scenes and most of the lines. Berk is a Viking island that dragons raid at night. Hiccup (Mason Thames) is the chief’s son and no good at fighting them, and one night he brings down the one dragon nobody has ever seen up close. That is the first act, and it is the first act of the other film to the beat. What follows is handsome, careful, about half an hour longer than it needs to be, and never quite sure why it exists.
Start with what it does well, which is more than the harsher reviews allow. Bill Pope shoots Berk in flat grey daylight and the night raids by fire, so the dragons arrive as shapes against burning thatch before you can tell what they are. The island is real rock and real weather, with wind in the actors’ hair and mud on their boots, and it gives the village a weight the cartoon never wanted. Dominic Watkins builds it from heavy black timber and carved beams, everything a size too big for the people in it. Lindsay Pugh dresses the Vikings in fur and hide that look slept in and puts Hiccup in a thin green tunic, so he is underdressed among his own kind.
Toothless is the whole film, and here we side with the admirers. He is an animal rather than a cartoon, with black hide that takes the light, ears that turn to sound, and eyes that narrow before they trust. The scene in the cove where Hiccup holds out his hand, looks away and waits moved us more than we expected, and we know that scene by heart. It works because it takes its time: the camera stays low, nobody speaks, and the dragon’s decision plays across a face that is not human and is entirely readable. We had come to be unimpressed and were not.
Thames is a good Hiccup, quick and dry and visibly frightened of his father, and he carries the long middle stretch without much help from the script. Gerard Butler voiced Stoick in 2010 and plays him in the flesh here, and he is better for the body: a big man who fills a doorway and cannot talk to a boy who fills nothing. Nick Frost’s Gobber has a set of detachable hands, a stock of stories about losing the original, and the film’s best timing. Nico Parker gives Astrid a wariness that reads as ambition rather than spite. The other trainees, Gabriel Howell, Julian Dennison, Bronwyn James and Harry Trevaldwyn, get the jokes they had before and not much else.
John Powell scored the original and returns, and the moment his flying theme comes in over a dragon leaving the ground is still the best thing this series owns. The flights are what live action was for. Pope shoots them from behind the rider’s shoulder, over sea and through cloud, and the sound of wind does the rest; we were grinning. Wyatt Smith’s cutting of the ground action is less sure. The raids are busy and dark and more than once we lost track of which dragon was where.
Now the trouble. The film runs 125 minutes and the story has not grown to fill them. Scenes the animation snapped through now breathe, and some of them sag: the training-ring lessons, the councils in the great hall, a good deal of standing about. Around the hour mark we noticed we were mouthing lines before the actors said them, and from then on we were watching an expensive tribute act. Some critics have called it dead. It is not dead; it is second-hand.
Cressida Cowell’s books gave DeBlois a boy, a dragon and an island, and in 2010 he made something of his own from them. This time he has copied himself, and the copy is exact: not a scene reordered, not a character rethought. The case for it is that a child who has not seen the first film will see this one, and could do far worse. The case against is sitting on a shelf in most of their houses.
If you see it, see it in a cinema, for the flights and for Toothless, who deserves the size. At home it will feel like what it is, a longer, slower, well-made copy. It carries a PG and reached UK cinemas on 9 June 2025.
