If you’re not in the mood for an ass-kicking 11-year old or you want to see something that’s appropriate for kids this weekend, check out How to Train Your Dragon.  It’s an animated adventure that will entertain the kiddies and the adults they bring with them.

It’s a tale of Vikings and dragons living together – although not very amicably – on the island of Berk and of one young Viking’s struggle to fit in. “Hiccup” is the brawny Viking chief’s brainy son and he wants nothing more than to slay dragons like all of the other Viking warriors. But he just doesn’t seem to be cut out for it. Then he encounters an injured dragon, and, as the Hollywood promos so often say, “his world is turned upside down.” He ends up befriending and training that dragon and ultimately showing all of those Viking warriors a different way of looking at their “enemies.”

There are some nice little lessons about staying true to oneself and challenging the conventional wisdom, and of course, visually it’s a lot of fun with colorful dragons flying off the screen at you breathing fire. Plus Scotsmen Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson provide fun “Viking” accents to their characters.

My two under-ten companions dubbed it “awesome” when the credits rolled in the theater, although by the time we got home they had downgraded their review to a slightly less enthusiastic “it wasn’t as good as Avatar.” So I say go see it if you’ve got kids to entertain.  But if you’re an adult on your own, it doesn’t quite reach the level of a movie like “Up,” so unless you’re a freak for 3D, you can probably wait for it to come out on DVD.

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