Reign Of Fire

From the gratuitously misleading posters suggesting present-day aerial combat to the sidestepped questions at the story's very core, this ambitious and often engrossing post-apocalyptic drama comes so close to being good that it hurts. Lurching from admirably frank, multifaceted depictions of human physical and psychological survival to scenes so hokey they're almost surreal, the movie is like a thoroughbred horse without a jockey — a thing of beauty running nowhere. London, the present. Twelve-year-old Quinn (Ben Thornton) visits his mum (Alice Krige), a project engineer, at her underground railway tunnel site. There, workers awaken a dragon that's evidently be...