Van Helsing is a bad movie. Forget whether it works as a horror film (which it doesn’t), this is just a terrible hollywood movie. Universal Studios parades the fact that they have the rights to these classic characters without providing them a movie of any substance or value. Instead, we get an expensive kid’s action movie full of cheesy one-liners and lacking any real horror.
I was initially excited at the spectacle of seeing Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman and Mr Hyde doing battle with Hugh Jackman, adopting the role as Van Helsing. It suddenly went pear-shaped. The main plot is something about Dracula subcontracting Dr Frankenstein to reanimate the dead, so that he can have babies with his undead brides. Surely he should have gone on the IVF waiting list like everyone else. Only Dracula’s nemesis, Van Helsing, can stop him from unleashing these vampire babies on the world.
Hugh Jackman plays the hollywood-hero-by-numbers, he has none of the animal presence he displayed playing Wolverine in Xmen. He just plays a typical brooding hero, partial to spinning one-liners while saving the day. He is joined by Anna Valera, a girl-power vampire-hunter with an accent so bad it almost tops Keanu Reeves’s ‘english’ performance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. These cardboard cut-out protagonists evoke no sympathy from the audience. If they had been made more credible it may have worked, but then there are other factors hampering the quality of this picture.
The action scenes are unbelievable, not in a superlative good way – just plain unbelievable. At one point Van Helsing swings through a vampire’s ballroom doing an elaborate somersault before rescuing Anna from Dracula’s clutches. This looks CGI through and through. It would be hokey in a music video, let alone in a movie trying to engage you. The animal transformations also have the artifice of CGI painted all over them, what ever happened to the legacy of Rick Baker? His SFX makeup designs on An American Werewolf In London are still convincingly painful. The lycanthrope in Van Helsing had none of that wolf’s realism.
Also, the Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s novel was not a hollywood hunk. The movie would have been better served if it gave up its action movie aspirations and concentrated on offering up a good story, perhaps showcasing the literary character for the old eccentric doctor he was. My main gripe with this movie was the portrayal of Dracula. Richard Roxburg was good in Moulin Rouge as the snivelling lech, The Duke, but Count Dracula he ain’t! The director ought to have payed respect to one of cinema’s greatest horror icons. This Dracula has none of the violence of Christopher Lee or sexual tension of Gary Oldman, he’s just unconvincing. Dracula has no presence whatsoever. He looks like a spoilt goth. And the script makes it that he has no interest in mortal virgins, he is quite content with his undead bevvy of babes. He is hardly the human parasite he once was.
The vampire brides are suitably alluring and are always fun whenever onscreen. But this is insufficient, the movie needed to scary and not in such a rush to fulfil its hollywood criteria.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Essentially this is a poor movie that stands on the shoulders of the classics (ie Frankenstein, Dracula) but does them a disservice by producing an expensive, but hollow story for them. It never finds what made literature’s finest horrors so memorably terrifying in the first place. It pinpointed the look of the horror film fittingly (full moons, Transylvanian castles etc) then it decided to a whack a substandard action film in there. Awful.
