Flame retarded

It isn't my style to reveal a movie's ending, but Reign of Fire's wrap-up is too good _ meaning really bad _ to pass up. Don't read any further if you'll be surprised that there's a showdown with a flying, fire-breathing dragon and most of the right humans (i.e. recognizable stars) will survive.

One dragon _ supposedly the lone male that keeps the species going _ dies and the movie ends happily. But what about the other 999,999 female dragons that already scorched Earth into Mad Max-style oblivion and still torch a castle or two on occasion? Do they just mope around the cave eating ice cream now because the only available male is gone? And what about the eggs already fertilized? Won't some of them hatch male monsters to keep humans on their toes?

Already we've put more thought into Reign of Fire than its creators did. This is a monstrous movie, tinted with apocalyptic blues and artificial grime resembling rejected design ideas from Waterworld and The Postman. Director Rob Bowman (The X-Files) never recognizes the silliness of this material, choosing to build a somber myth from an opium pipe dream. The dragons are cool, but repetitive. The pacing is waltzian _ one, two, three, flame, one, two, three, burn _ in a numbing example of expertly produced nothingness.

The story begins with montage of a worldwide holocaust described by headlines, not pictures. A young boy named Quinn appears to have started the fire by rubbing the scaly skin of a dragon discovered by his archaeologist mom in London, apparently somewhere near Eleanor Rigby's neighborhood. A couple of decades later, he has grown into Christian Bale, complete with a strained Eliza Doolittle accent. Quinn is now a fire chief of sorts, patrolling for dragons and rounding up stray humans who wander outside their safe place.

A stranger arrives one day, a cigar-chomping Texan named Denton Van Zan (Woody Harrelson, no, wait, that's Matthew McConaughey) claiming to be a dragonslayer with tanks and helicopters fueled by some unexplained source but they look sharp. I'm guessing that the continents melted like candles allowing Van Zan and his artillery to make it to England. Anyway, Van Zan boasts that he knows how to kill dragons, at dusk when their eyesight is weakest, a technique that doesn't notably come into play for the rest of the movie.

Three writers were employed to make this mess interesting and the best they could offer is a scene when Quinn enacts a scene from The Empire Strikes Back for wide-eyed urchins like a library entertainer. Not as silly as The Postman's forays into The Sound of Music to illustrate the post-apocalypse decline of pop culture, but close.

McConaughey glares, Bale puffs his chest and Izabella Scorupco (Vertical Limit) models future Victoria's Secret designs. And Bowman depicts it all without seeming to crack a smile.

Reign of Fire

Grade: D-

Director: Rob Bowman

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale, Izabella Scorupco, Gerard Butler

Screenplay: Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka, Matt Greenberg

Rating: PG-13; intense action violence

Running time: 100 min.