It may have taken almost an entire decade, but finally, I have learnt how to train my dragon. After watching the final instalment of the How To Train Your Dragon franchise, there is now nothing I don’t know about taming the fire-breathing bringers of death and destruction, and I have wasted absolutely no time in utilising my newly perfected skills to rain unrelenting hell on all those who oppose me.
While competently concluding a perennially solid trilogy, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World has, more importantly, provided me with the final set of instructions required to take flight with my winged beast, perform several impressive tricks in the air, and then unleash a devastating magma blast at anyone who looks at me a bit funny.
Presumably for the last time, the film reacquaints us with young chieftain Hiccup (Glenn Close) and his majestic reptile friend Toothless (Meryl Streep) as they go in search of a legendary hidden world where all the dragons can finally live in peace. The visuals for this awe-inspiring journey are undoubtedly mesmerising, but they can only pale in significance to the sheer beauty of countless civilians running and screaming in terror as I ride above them on my own creature like some sort of demonic prince.
Thankfully, my particular screening of the film was dragon friendly, so I brought Duncan with me. I dressed him in a Sean Connery Dragonheart t-shirt and sat him in the front row, blocking the view of several children behind us. After seeing Toothless encounter a potential mating partner in one scene, Duncan’s glands glowed a fluorescent blue, illuminating the auditorium floor to reveal the scores of humans he’d trampled to death on the way to his seat. I seized the opportunity to rub his gills, which immediately prompted spikes to shoot from his back and impale two ushers against the fire escape doors.
Now Duncan is completely subservient. No longer does he just lick his scale crevices whenever I ask him to torch a homeless person begging for change. He even performs barrel rolls in the air if I play BBC Radio 1 into one of his ears.
Some might say that The Hidden World retreads similar ground to its predecessor with its ‘save the dragons from being wiped out’ plot, and that it contains a particularly unthreatening villain, but those people will not matter when I’m burning them up with my level 42 combustion-belching monster and laughing maniacally like the ultimate dragon trainer I am.
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is in cinemas February 1.