Overall Rating
  Awesome: 7.06%
Worth A Look: 15.34%
Average: 10.12%
Pretty Bad: 18.4%
Total Crap: 49.08%
16 reviews, 230 user ratings
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| Van Helsing |
by Ryan Arthur
"Blücher!"
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Here's an idea: take a well-known trio of characters, characters with tradition and backstory, characters that are the cornerstone of a legendary film studio's rich history...and take a massive steaming dump over all of it? Why, that's the driving idea behind Van Helsing!First of all, I get it: Van Helsing is supposed to be this big, dumb, popcorn movie for summer. But I frankly expect more from a film that trumpeted the fact that it was reintroducing the characters of Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man to two audiences: those that love the characters and those that are seeing them for the first time. Kind of a pity that Dracula's all wrong, the Wolf Man's a bad special effect and Frankenstein's monster - the one who seems to be the most faithful to the source material, the most done "right" - gets the least amount of screen time?
Van Helsing starts promisingly. The Universal logo fades from color to black and white, dissolves into a ball of fire and then dissolves again into the flaming end of a torch held by the member of an angry mob. Nifty. The mob storms Castle Frankenstein, where the monster (Shuler Hensley)'s being born under the watchful eye of his "father" (Samuel West), Igor (Kevin J. O'Connor) and...Dracula (Richard Roxburgh)? What's the dilly? Well, Drac needs the big guy for something, but he doesn't get the chance to use him: the mob enters, chasing the monster (with dead pop in tow) to a rickety old windmill, where he's presumably destroyed in a fire, while Drac and his three vamps (Josie Maran, Elena Anaya and Mrs. Roxburgh, Silvia Colloca) lament their loss.
Cut to a year later, where we're in London and in color. It's pretty much all downhill from there. We see the titular monster hunter/killer (Hugh Jackman) botch the capture of Hagrid before returning to Rome. He works for the church, see, and they're sending him and his sidekick, the Q-crossed-crossed-with-Porky Pig-as-comedy-relief Carl (David Wenham) to Transylvania to help the last remaining members of the gypsy clan Valerious take out Dracula, who's been picking off villagers for the last century. Van Helsing takes up with Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale) to try and off the big bad bat, who's using the Wolf Man (Will Kemp) as a henchman. The plot is your standard bad guy wants world domination. The vehicle is Drac and his brides setting thousands of their "children" (read: bat-babies) loose on the world. It's the execution that is horrible. I'd call it Castlevania: The Movie, but that's really not fair to Castlevania.
I'll give Van Helsing this: it looks pretty darn good. The set design is impressive, particularly the two castle locations. Jackman tries his hardest to make heroic, and Beckinsale looks quite yummy. But past that, outside of the look of the film itself, there's literally nothing there.
The story (what little of it there is) abandons logic and common sense, not so much rewriting the Universal monster mythology as setting fire to it and then urinating on it. Vamps can be in daylight...as long as it's overcast! Men change into werewolves by the light of the full moon...then transform back if it's really cloudy! Townspeople who live in fear of Dracula stand outside and wait for him to show up with his vamp harem...then freak out when he shows up! Yes, run out into the open to be swept up and away towards certain doom! Idiots. Director Stephen Sommers professes love for the classic Universal characters, yet pisses all over their origins and histories. Dracula's henchmen? Jawas! That's right: who's helping the undead? Evil midgets! The film climaxes with a final battle between two of the key characters, and features one computer-generated character fighting another. And yes, it looks horrible. The finale harkens back to both The Lion King and the death of "Bleeding Gums" Murphy, of all things, and lacks the emotional oomph of both.
Acting-wise, Jackman fares the best, but that's not saying much. The script has lame one-liners for all, and Jackman seems to be trying the hardest to play everything relatively straight. Beckinsale can't seem to keep a handle on her Romanian accent from one scene to the next, and seems bored out of her pretty little head. Must be the fact that she's in her second suckass werewolf/vampire movie in as many years. Wenham's lightyears from Faramir, which is far from a good thing. And Roxburgh? Richard Roxburgh, who I actually liked as a brazenly hammy Duke in Moulin Rouge!, gives possibly the worst performance I've seen in a film in roughly the last ten years. And I've seen Seagal movies. He's not scary, menacing, creepy...he's just sort of there. It's as if the entire performance were delivered while in a coma. He was going for weighty melodrama that came across as gay drowsiness. Even when he flies into a rage, it's as though the rage were tempered by massive amounts of Transylvanian Prozac. You'd think a guy with three hot vampire wives would have a little more pep.
I hated Van Helsing. I hated that outside of the opening sequence, there was no reverence to the source material. I hated the fact that it took three heavyweights of horror and stuck 'em in a PG-13 kid-friendly commercial for video games, toys and cartoons. I hated the fact that it was a jokey, campy, talky bore instead of a balls-out action horror hybrid. I hated the fact that the Wolf Man became a badly animated cartoon. I hated the final twenty minutes most of all.Van Helsing is reportedly the new Universal franchise, the cornerstone of a series that will probably go back to the well, with the title character facing more Universal monsters (Creature From The Black Lagoon? Invisible Man? Abbott & Costello?), making Van Helsing the new Batman, with the Universal library of monsters his rogues gallery. If that's the case, the first Van Helsing is already Batman & Robin, and Stephen Sommers is Joel Schumacher. Is that really what the moviegoing public wants? Or needs?
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=9518&reviewer=7
originally posted: 05/09/04 14:03:13
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USA
07-May-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 19-Oct-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
05-May-2004
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