Don't listen to the reviews, this movie is a borefest that also managed to ruin the lore of the entire trilogy! I won't go into any spoilers but since the movie isn't out yet in many places and there aren't many reviews at all because of that, I wanted to give a quick heads up to anyone wanting to watch it soon. Don't. It's a horrible sequel to two fantastic movies, and I'll get to why here:
It feels like a cheap knockoff of the first two. Most of the movie are just quick one-liners or jokes to keep children entertained, except, they forgot one thing: a goddamn plot.
The plot is very basic and the poor villain doesn't help. It doesn't really feel like anything is at stake because the villain is literally just one person that wants to hunt Toothless, and nothing else. He's constantly said to be very menacing and smart but he doesn't really do anything clever except for the first time he's revealed. After that, he just takes a seat back and become your run of the mill saturday morning cartoon villain.
The movie feels like it's more about toothless being in love than anything else. In fact, it feels like they completely ignore the threat at hand in many parts of the movie just to shoehorn some scenes where toothless tries to get with the female night fury. These scenes are 10 times longer than they should be, they're not funny when they repeat the same joke again and again, and they're just boring. One of these scenes are almost 10 minutes long, 10 minutes of literally nothing happening.
Which leads me to my biggest issue in the movie: it feels like 50% of runtime is just establishing shots and literally nothing happening. I'm not even kidding, the plot doesn't advance at all after a certain point until the very last 20 minutes of the movie. All of it is just a dragon flying through the air with whimsical music in the background. These scenes were used sparingly in the first 2 movies, but here they just act as filler between plot points.
Even the action sequences aren't very good. Hiccup is holding his flame sword almost every scene but he never uses it once in the entire movie. None of the people use any weapons they're holding in any of the fight scenes, none of the fights feel like actual fights, most of them are just the heroes bumbling around until the villains fall over or hit a wall or something. It almost feels like the hidden village fight in kung fu panda 3, it's just silly and was made with no effort.
The only redeemable thing about this movie is the heartwarming ending, but everything else was just... Bad. Not even a good kind of bad, a boring "I'm considering just leaving this movie because nothing is happening" kind of bad. Most of this could've been an episode in the cartoon network show, only with good CGI and stretched as a movie.
TL;DR: I went in this movie expecting something along the lines of the first two movies. I decided to watch it regardless of reviews, and oh boy I wish I'd gone to another movie. This might be a good movie for your kids, but if you're over 12 years old, prepare to spin in your seat because this movie is shockingly bad, and this is coming from a big fan of the first two.