How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World review: The dragons are great, shame about the humans

Stunningly beautiful sequences can't make up for the lacklustre storytelling of this third outing for Hiccup and his dragon friends

Dir: Dean DeBlois; Voiced by: Jay Baruchel, Cate Blanchett, Gerard Butler, TJ Miller, Kristen Wiig, Kit Harington, Craig Ferguson, F Murray Abraham

The richness and detail of the imagery in the latest DreamWorks animated feature sadly is not matched by the storytelling or characterisation. Certain sequences here are stunningly beautiful: shots of solitary dragons soaring through cloud-filled skies, and of thousands of the beasts, all different colours and shapes, in their ancestral home. There are huge waterfalls and mazes of caves. But the human characters seem lacklustre by comparison. As in the previous two films, they speak in a bizarre mixture of accents (American, Scottish, Scandinavian) and look as if they have stumbled out of an Asterix comic book.

Hiccup is the diffident young Viking hero (“just a guy”) who devotes his life to rescuing dragons from enslavement. The film opens with a sea battle during which he shows his familiar heroism. Jay Baruchel voices him in breathless fashion, making him sound more like a high school student than an ancient warrior.

On Hiccup’s home island of Berk, humans and dragons live cheek by jowl and spend much of their time slobbering over each other in the great hall. Hiccup is the leader but a very self-effacing one. He and warrior princess Astrid (America Ferrera) are clearly in love, but wary about marriage. The blacksmith Gobber the Belch (voiced by Craig Ferguson) is a father figure to Hiccup, and is here as much of a hairy hooligan as in the previous films. Roaring and belching, he lives up fully to his name.

The romance between Hiccup and Astrird is mirrored by that between Hiccups’s dragon, “night fury” Toothless and a white female dragon nicknamed Light Fury. The courtship provides some of the film’s most charming moments. Writer-director Dean DeBlois doesn’t anthropomorphise the creatures; the dragons themselves don’t speak, but communicate in moans and bellows. Some of the little dragons may be very cute but they’re also wild and ferocious animals.

The villain of the piece is Grimmel (F Murray Abraham), a dragon hunter who looks a bit like Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal and speaks in such a strange, European-sounding accent that we know he is not to be trusted. He wants to kill as many of the fiery beasts as he can and to destroy everything that Hiccup loves. He has a vast fleet and has drugged various dragons to do his bidding. Rather than confront him head on, Hiccup comes up with a plan for everybody (humans and dragons alike) to leave Berk and to look for the dragons’ mythical home at the edge of the world.

Grimmel is far more ruthless and cunning than Hiccup. He lives for the hunt. At first, Hiccup seems powerless against him. When he is not riding on a dragon, he is a weak and diminished figure who struggles to keep the confidence of the other members of the tribe. He has a prosthetic leg and isn’t nimble, but he isn’t big or brave either.

Perhaps because it is set in ancient times and features vikings as heroes, the film lacks the wisecracking, contemporary humour found in most of the Pixar films. In one very lively scene, Ruffnut Thorston (voiced by Kristen Wiig) is kidnapped and imprisoned by Grimmel but drives him to distraction with her inane, valley girl-style prattle. She simply won’t shut up. Such scenes, though, are rare.

In the course of the film, Hiccup has all the experiences you would expect in a rites of passage story like this. Not only is he saving dragons, he is growing up. At times, as he shows selflessness and courage and proves that he doesn’t need the dragons as a crutch, the film verges on sermonising. But it only really soars when the dragons themselves take wing. Its battle sequences and set pieces high above the clouds are far more impressive than anything that happens at ground level.