Legendary (2013)

 Legendary (2013)
aka: Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon

Starring: Scott Adkins, Dolph Lundgren, Yi Huang, Nathan Lee, James Lance, Lydia Leonard, Le Geng
Director: Eric Styles

Scott Adkins? In a movie without martial arts? Where scenes that would lead into a fight end with him running away? Has the world gone topsy-turvy? It apparently has. So yeah, Adkins was a film that Adkins made while recovering from a back injury and looking for roles that didn’t require him to perform aerial kicks. To quote Maria Pitillo from Godzilla (1998): Where’s the fun in that? Well, the fun is in his other movies. Legendary is mainly a film for those most die-hard of Adkins and Lundgren completists, or more appropriately, movies about killer animals.

 Akins plays Travis Preston, a famous Cryptozoologist who’s leading an expedition into Western Russia in search of an honest-to-god cave bear. He and his team, including wealthy big game hunter Harker (Dolph Lundgren, who also doesn’t fight in this one), run afoul of the monster, who ends up killing a member of their team. Some time later, Preston, now disgraced, is being sued by Harker and several other entities, and is on his way out, professionally. He’s visited by the lawyer for a wealthy admirer of Preston’s work who wants him to investigate a large reptilian cryptid who has been attacking the construction site of a dam in China.

Preston and some members of his old team arrive in China, only to discover that Harker has been officially hired to off the creature, whatever it is. Since Preston’s presence is as an observer, he doesn’t have access to the more official info about what’s going on. So he and his team start sneaking into Harker’s base to find out what’s really going. And then there’s the creature, who continues to attack and mutilate construction workers at random. Just what is it? Perhaps a dragon, as the various titles—the Portuguese title is A Tumba do Dragão, or The Dragon’s Tomb—would suggest?

 The answer is “nah”. It’s just a giant CGI lizard.

The monster doesn’t show itself until the last 20 minutes, so until then, we mainly have characters talking at their base camp, talking at Harker’s base camp, talking on boats, and just talking at places in general. There’s the occasionally glimpse of a CGI monster, which *might* be a dragon, but in the end, isn’t. That is, unless, you recall that some lizard species have “dragon” in their names, like the Soa-Soa Water Dragon, the Bearded Dragon, and the Komodo Dragon. I suppose a giant lizard is a fine killer animal for a film like this; we’ve gotten far too many giant snakes and sharks, let the lizards reign!

But yeah, there isn’t much to recommend this British-Chinese co-production. The Portuguese and French titles suggest a Tomb Raider-esque adventure with a monster waiting at the end, but that doesn’t happen. The American title and box art suggest a dragon-dragon, but that doesn’t happen either.  The cast suggests a martial arts-gunplay bloodbath, but there’s absolutely none of that here. Just a bunch of people talking until the end, when a twenty-foot gecko starts killing off the major supporting characters in a large cave. Meh.