Iron Mask (2019)

Iron Mask arrives bearing the aliases of a film that has passed through customs more than once. Known variously as Viy 2, The Dragon Seal, and The Mystery of the Dragon Seal, this Russian-Chinese co-production is a sequel to a 2014 horror picture loosely drawn from Gogol, though the loose part has now been stretched past recognition. The casting of Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a pair of Chinese co-leads reflects an arrangement of international financing and market access, not a representational program. Diversity here is a distribution strategy wearing a costume.

The plot concerns a dragon whose eyelashes brew a tea that cures all disease, a cult of White Wizards, and a schism with greedy Black Wizards who overtax the townsfolk. That last detail supplies the film's only faint political pulse: elites squeezing the common people, a trope old enough to vote. A female villain drives the intrigue, and Chen-Lan eventually takes the throne, which reads as standard fantasy adventuring. The dragon is a resource to be harvested, not an ecosystem to be mourned, so any environmental reading is our own projection.

The result is a weightless green-screen pageant, to borrow the Guardian's word, in which nothing is preached and nothing is meant. There is no lecture, no sermon, no lesson about identity or history or the planet. Peter the Great and the Tower of London serve as fantasy furniture. The film's failure is not ideological but kinetic: it is dull, overlong, and unintentionally funny where it hoped to be epic. A Razzie nomination for Schwarzenegger confirms the diagnosis. We can award it credit for restraint. We cannot award it much else.