Film Reviews: How to Train Your Dragon makes superb use of Northern Irish scenery

Irish Examiner

13-06-2025

You don't have to be mad to live on the remote northern island of Berk, but it helps if you're the kind of deranged Viking who enjoys nothing more than a good old dust-up with a fire-breathing beastie.
The live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon (PG), which is slavishly faithful to the 2010 animation, opens with the teenaged Hiccup (Mason Thames) a frustrated apprentice in the village armoury and barred — despite being the son of the chief, Stoick the Vast (Gerald Butler, reprising his role in the original) — from playing a part in defending the island from the dragons that regularly descend on Berk to pillage its livestock and barbecue its humans.
Until, that is, Hiccup manages to snare the most fearsome of all the dragon species, a Night Fury ('the unholy offspring of lightning and death'), at which point a previously unthinkable proposition arises: could human and dragon somehow learn to work together?
Written and directed by Dean DeBlois, this version of How to Train… is a lively blend of live action and animation that makes superb use of a variety of Northern Ireland settings (Dunseverick Castle and the Giant's Causeway both feature).
Its central message, that of bitter foes learning to co-operate to their mutual benefit, remains intact and as timely as ever, and the action sequences are neatly executed, particularly when Hiccup and his new pal Toothless go swooping through the sea stacks off the Northern Ireland coast.
Mason Thames isn't especially dynamic in the lead role, but there's strong support: Gerald Butler gnawing great chunks out the scenery as the Viking chief Stoick, Nick Frost providing comic relief as Hiccup's mentor Gobber, and Nico Parker as Astrid, the fiery warrior-in-training who brings a blowtorch intensity to pretty much everything she does, romance included.
Lollipop.
Lollipop
★★★★★
Theatrical release
Kafka meets Catch 22 in Lollipop (15A), which opens with Londoner Molly Brown (Posy Sterling) leaving prison after serving a four-month sentence.
Now living in a tent, and desperate to get her kids out of foster care, Molly discovers that she can't have her kids if she can't provide them with a home, and she can't get a home if she doesn't have any kids to house.
An ostensibly straightforward dilemma, but one fiendishly difficult to unravel as Molly grows increasingly frustrated with the various social services, who argue, very reasonably, that her children's welfare is their primary concern.
Written and directed by Daisy-May Hudson, Lollipop is a brilliant, stress-inducing slice of social realism featuring terrific performances from TerriAnn Cousins as Molly's alcoholic mother, and Idil Ahmed as Molly's former schoolfriend and a woman who finds herself in a similar plight.
That said, the whole film revolves around the superb chemistry between Posy Sterling, who is in blistering form here, and the wonderfully natural Tegan-Mia Stanley Roads and Luke Howitt, playing her daughter and son.
Tornado
★★★☆☆
Theatrical release
Set in 1790, on the wintry Scottish moors, Tornado (15A) stars Kôki as the eponymous heroine, a Japanese girl who has stolen a sack of gold from a gang of outlaws led by Sugarman (Tim Roth) and Little (Jack Lowden), and is now fleeing for her life.
But as the outlaws stride across the lawless moors killing and burning with impunity, they fail to consider one crucial question: what happens when Tornado, the daughter of a samurai warrior, stops running and turns to fight?
Writer-director John Maclean (Slow West) recreates the Wild West in the Scottish Highlands, an amoral world where life plays out on a barren, windswept landscape devoid of civilisation and pity.
Kôki's performance is a touch stiff at times — to be fair, her young character, recently orphaned, spends much of the film semi-paralysed with mortal terror — but Tim Roth and Jack Lowden have a whale of a time as the dead-eyed sociopathic killers.