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Ian Stanley reviews 
- Cert:
- Running time: 132 minutes
- Year: 2004
- Released: 7th May 2004
- Widescreen Ratio: 2.35:1
- Rating: 3/10
Director:
- Stephen Sommers
(The Adventures of Huck Finn, Deep Rising, The Jungle Book (1994), The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, Van Helsing)
Producers:
- Stephen Sommers and Bob Ducsay
Screenplay:
- Stephen Sommers
Music:
- Alan Silvestri
Cast:
- Van Helsing: Hugh Jackman
Anna Valerious: Kate Beckinsale
Count Dracula: Richard Roxburgh
Carl: David Wenham
Frankenstein’s Monster: Shuler Hensley
Aleera: Elena Anaya
Velkan: Will Kemp
Igor: Kevin J. O’Connor
And so, 2004’s ‘Blockbuster Season’ begins in earnest. First out of the gate is Van Helsing, Stephen Sommers‘ first film as director since he disappointed us with The Mummy Returns in 2001.
The movie starts with a black & white sequence set in Transylvania where Castle Frankenstein is under siege from a group of irate villagers, upset with Dr. Frankenstein’s late-night grave robbing antics. This particular night just happens to be the very same that the good Doctor successfully brings his creation to life, how about that for timing? It also just happens that Count Dracula (pronounced ‘Drakulya’ as per the current movie trend) picks this night to pay a visit also, we discover that Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) has been financing Frankenstein’s research, and has plans of his own for the monster that do not sit well with the Doctor. Anyway, skip forward five minutes and Dr Frankenstein is dead, the monster (Schuler Hensley) is thought lost (in one of the movies ‘many’ fires) and Dracula and his three lovely brides are a bit upset about the whole thing.
Skip forward a year and we find Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is working for one of the (movie) Churches many secret organisations, this particular one hunts down monsters. Having just freshly returned from a mission in Paris battling ‘Mr Hyde’ he is quickly despatched to Transylvania to help sort out their vampire problem. He is told to assist the rapidly diminishing Valerious family, who are both Gypsy Royalty and monster hunters… Indeed, whilst en route to their village Princess Anna appears to lose her brother Velkan during an attack from a special effect called ‘The Wolfman.’ As luck would have it, Van Helsing arrives at the village just as Dracula’s Brides attack it. His help in resolving the situation earns him the trust of Anna (Kate Beckinsale), and so the two team up and head off to find out what Dracula’s up to and then whup his ass, or something!
Where to start? There’s so much wrong with this movie that it’s truly difficult to know… Well, as a movie it misses most of it’s targets by quite a wide margin, as a monster movie it’s not scary, as an action movie it’s not exciting, a good cast give mostly poor performances and as for the romance, it’s dead in the water! It beggars belief, that with all the talent involved, and an estimated budget of $150 million, that this is the best that could be conjured up. The majority of the blame for this dud has to be landed at the feet of the Director, Writer and Co-Producer, one Mr. Stephen Sommers, proving that having your name attached so many times to a movies credits is a double-edged sword.
Sommers kicked off his ventures into the monster genre with the Wonderful Deep Rising, which, sadly, still remains his best film to date. It had everything a genre film needs to succeed, a game cast, a witty script, a wonderful premise, some truly exciting set pieces and Treat Williams to boot. It also had some of the ropiest early CGI going, but that really didn’t spoil the ride. After that Sommer’s movies have got progressively worse and Van Helsing does nothing to stem this rot! I can see Sommers quickly becoming another George Lucas, he is good with the visuals, has an over-reliance on CGI and can’t inject any heart into his films. This leaves us with only empty spectacle and for a short time this can be enough, but with a running time here of over two hours we seriously need something more.
Some of the movies set-pieces are quite exciting, most notably the scene in which Draculas three brides attack Annas village and another when the Wolfman attacks a Horse-drawn carriage. But there is no real sense of threat towards the characters, as Sommers has seen fit to invest the leads with an almost superhuman ability to brush off any physical damage. With the Van Helsing character its not too distracting, as the film strongly suggests he is of a supernatural origin, but for the Anna character there is simply no excuse.
The problems with this film are manifold, but most of them originate from a lazy script that sacrifices a proper set-up and character development for the sake of pacing. The result of this is that, for all of the spectacle that this film throws at us, we care little about the actual outcome. To be fair to Sommer’s, with this film he does make a couple of attempts to put some heart into it, but they’re so ham-fisted that they end up evoking laughter rather than the intended emotion. As an example, there is one scene where Van Helsing gazes wistfully up into the sky and has a vision of another character amongst the clouds. Yuk!
The dialogue in this film is uniformly poor, there are very few decent one-liners and it’s often clumsy and exposition heavy, of the, “Ah Van Helsing, when we found you years ago on the church steps with your memory gone” type. It also goes to great pains to make sure that even the simplest mind can follow it. In the films opening section a priest gives Van Helsing an object, and its hard not to expect a big green arrow to appear, pointing at the object, with the text Remember this Its important! Another example of this is later on the film when Jackman and Beckinsale are walking through a hall thats filled with loads of egg/cocoon type objects hooked up to electrical wires. Jackman sagely intones something along the lines of “It looks like Draculas trying to bring these to life!” It really doesnt, but thats whats happening anyway and this film doesnt trust you to with enough information to work it out for yourself.
David Wenham, Kevin J. O Connor and Shuler Hensley are the recipients of the best lines and, incidentally, the only cast members who come out of this with any dignity, everybody else should just hang their heads in shame… Hugh Jackman, so good as Wolverine, seems badly miscast here and also totally lost. The two X-Men movies, and Swordfish show that Jackman has got a good handle on delivering hard-boiled putdowns. That ability doesn’t seem to translate too well to the kind of glib, throwaway one-liners that this script asks him to deliver. Kate Beckinsale (who’s hotter than the Sun but whose acting ability is about to get seriously reconsidered) heads up the bad accent brigade as Gypsy Princess ‘Anna Valerious.’ Clad in a pair of tight black trousers (God bless you, Stephen!) Beckinsale acquits herself well in the physical scenes but with regards to any required emoting, she’s phoning it in here. Why Sommers didn’t let the cast speak in their own accents is going to be one of life’s unanswered questions, well, only until this film fades from memory (about five minutes). Troy has shown that a disconcertingly wide array of accents doesn’t necessarily harm ‘suspension of disbelief,’ but a cast of people “torking like zis” kicks it right out the window.
Onto Richard Roxburgh who has created something truly wonderful in his portrayal of Dracula. Not since Bobby Ray Schafer lit up the screen as Officer Joe Vickers in the original Psycho Cop, has a villainous character been less threatening and this inherently funny. Roxburgh camps it up to the nth degree, lisping and damn near mincing his way up walls and across ceilings, leaving mangled lines of bad dialogue in his wake. It is truly a sight to behold. Roxburgh’s lisping, along with the thick accent he puts on, leaves a good 40% of his direlogue unintelligible, with any luck these lines will be subtitled on the eventual DVD release. Also, for a character who’s torment is partly that he cannot feel emotion’ Roxburgh spends a good portion of this movie bellowing his lines like Al Pacino on crack. The “I am hoooolllloooowwww!” speech seems to be making a doomed effort to usurp Bill Shatner’s cry of “KKKhhhhaaaannnnn!” to sit atop the throne of over-acting.
Dracula’s brides are not much better, and their performances seem to suggest they were cast for looks alone. A scene in which Dracula throws a hissy fit and shouts at the brides makes one think they’ve wandered into a big screen ‘Am Dram’ performance of the emotion ‘angst.’ All twisted limbs and timid crouching.
When even rent-a-hack Paul WS Anderson has realised and admitted that CGI isn’t scary, it beggars belief that the same lesson has escaped Sommers. After the drubbing his Low-res, PS2 rendered CGI Scorpion King received when it appeared in the Mummy sequel, you’d think that it might have sunken in by now. However, it seems that it hasnt, he believes the answer is just to give ILM more time so they can create higher-res, but still inherently lame, CGI monsters. Even the resolutely low-budget Dog Soldiers created scarier lycanthropes, so what’s this movie’s excuse? Some of the CGI shots here are very good, for example many of the shots of Dracula’s Brides in flight and their transformations from bat-like form to human form, but some of it is also really poor and badly integrated into the live action shots. The worst CGI shot of the movie is of a simple ship sailing on choppy waters, yet cutting through the waves as if it were on rails.
It’s easy to bust on bad CGI, and use it as a bat to beat the overall movie with, but many great movies suffer from bad CGI and ropey effects work. The difference between those movies and this one though, is that they have good stuff going on in other areas of the film. Its easy to maintain suspension of disbelief when you have an emotional investment in the story and the characters, and want to see how it all pans out. Van Helsing gives you none of this, meaning that the movie’s climax featuring a fight between a CGI Dracula and a CGI werewolf, has all the emotional resonance of watching somebody else play Tekken, only less interesting as the eventual outcome is never in doubt.
If you want to see a film that’s unpredictable, funny, scary and exciting, then catch Shaun Of The Dead if it’s still playing, do not, under any circumstances, watch this film! If it makes enough money then it’ll only convince them to make more like it, and that would be a bad thing. Just wait a couple of years and it’ll be on ITV anyway, where it truly belongs!
Review copyright © Ian Stanley, 2004.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.