'How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World' Movie Review: soars in fits and starts

There are moments in the "How to Train Your Dragon" series so beautifully realized, so attuned to the joys of flight and to nuances of light and shadow, that it's worth wondering why the movies themselves never quite achieve your full surrender.

I speak only for myself, of course. Your personal dragon-riding mileage may vary, especially if this DreamWorks animated cycle's $1-billion-plus in global box-office receipts is any indication. In the case of "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World," a third and presumably final chapter from the writer-director Dean DeBlois, it is hard not to choke up at the prospect of a poignant farewell and equally hard not to wish that the individual elements soared as consistently as advertised. Perhaps the highs feel so stirring, in part, because they are surrounded by so much conventional din and clatter.

To reach those lovely, near-wordless scenes of intimate communion between the young Viking leader Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and his black-scaled companion, Toothless, you have to endure a few inscrutably busy action scenes and an awful lot of strained, obnoxious banter among Hiccup's many, many friends. Since we've reached the end of a trilogy, couldn't at least one of them have been incinerated or taken a fatal tumble along the way?

The "Dragon" movies may aspire to be a PG-rated "Game of Thrones," but that's no reason to eliminate life-and-death stakes from the equation.

Which is not to say that these pictures have been devoid of tragedy. Starting with the original 2010 adaptation of Cressida Cowell's novel, Hiccup's coming-of-age journey has been suffused with loss and steadily paved with reminders that pain and growth go hand-in-hand. In 2014's "How to Train Your Dragon 2," the darkest picture in the cycle, he lost his beloved father, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), and succeeded him as chieftain of Berk, their island home. Under Hiccup's leadership, this enclave of former dragon hunters has become a community of dragon lovers.

As "The Hidden World" opens, Hiccup and his people have perhaps taken their dream of long-term coexistence past the limits of what is reasonable. Their habit of liberating their fire-breathing friends from hunters' ships and bringing them home has turned Berk into the world's "first Viking-dragon utopia," though no one is rude enough to call it an infestation.

Berk has since become a target for new villains like Grimmel (F. Murray Abraham), a fearsome dragon slayer determined to kill Toothless, the last of a rare breed of alpha dragons called Night Furies.