Be warned, folks, a movie hasn’t angered me this much since ‘The Village’. In the first of a triple-threat of Aussie casting, Hugh Jackman plays Abraham Van Helsing, hired as a killer by the Vatican in the late 19th Century to do away with Dracula (Richard Roxburgh- bringing nothing to the part, not even a convincing sneer) and whatever other horror movie monsters Stephen Sommers (whose ‘The Mummy’ was pitiful, but the sequel was surprisingly fun) wanted to degrade for the sake of a few bucks ( Faust ). I’m not even sure if this quite qualifies for a horror movie even, it’s like ‘Indiana Jones’ meets ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ (which wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d heard).
Kate Beckinsale plays…um…some tough Transylvanian chick, apparently a fellow vampire hunter…and she has a brother (who has…issues), but that’s about it for character development. Roxburgh is woefully cast as Dracula, it’s almost as though I was watching Bela Lugosi in his Ed Wood period (and you know what that means) trying to imitate Max Schreck’s unforgettable work in ‘Nosferatu’. Where’s the refinement, the sensuality, the eeeevil and yes, the Count-like behaviour (aristocratic and deadly serious) of Christopher Lee (whose Dracula was animalistic in spurts, admittedly), the best of the Dracula’s.
And don’t get me started on Frankenstein’s Monster, who looks even less convincing than the one on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and was that Mr. Hyde? Then why was he hanging out in Quasimodo’s pad? He’s an MGM ringer anyway. Kevin J. O’Connor seems born to play Dracula’s servant Igor (umm, where’s Renfield? Fritz? Frau Blucher?…er…scratch that last one), but the appalling makeup job on him, resembling the awful stuff they used on ‘Buffy’, ruins any chances the poor guy had at credibility here, just as he was annoying in ‘The Mummy’, I might add.
The film is disastrously overlong, incoherent (in its foolish attempts to bring all the monsters together in one film), and overall it comes across as though Sommers and co had gone to make a tribute to the Universal horror franchise…without ever having seen any of the films (I think Jackman must’ve, he spends most of the film fighting to hide his embarrassment, and the rest of the time searching for his character arc. He loses both battles admirably).
The opening sequence in black & white had its moments (until Dracula showed up), thanks to an actor who looked quite a bit like Colin Clive, but aside from that, David Wenham (in a poorly written role, a sort of comic relief Q), the only things worthy of praise are the nice cinematography, and an excellent score by Alan Silvestri, who continues to thankfully make his work on the terrible ‘Quick and the Dead’ (boy, am I in a bad mood or what?) a distant memory.
OVERALL SUMMARY
What can you say about a film even Hugh Jackman can’t save? Woefully misguided, overlong, undernourished, and almost funny…in the wrong way. And why did those vampire chicks have no nipples? That’s just wrong, man.
