Van Helsing

Posted by Greg

November 11, 2007

Van-dalising Tradition

** out of *****

As I’ve said before in other reviews, people love being scared by monster movies. It’s something deep down that we all share, a common theme spanning generations. Monsters, when done right, have the ability to invade pop culture and live forever. Three of the most illustrious examples being the Wolfman, Frankenstein and the Granddaddy of them all, Dracula. These three baddies have lived for generations and their respective legends adapted into every conceivable form of entertainment. So when director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, The Mummy Returns) decided to stash all three of the famous creatures into one gigantic movie, Hollywood suits must have been salivating. “We got hot girls, gruff heroes, three types of monsters, killer effects and cool weapons - we can’t lose!” I’d love to report that they were right, but unfortunately, they were wrong. So very, very wrong.

Deeply inspired by the cinematic intermissions in video games, the bloated Van Helsing tells the story of Gabriel Van Helsing (his older brother Abe, the original vampire killer, was unattainable due to copyright law), and his quest to rid the world of evil. The movie wastes no time in getting right to the action, with the classic scene of torch-bearing villagers hunting down Frankenstein and his terrifying monster. From there, we’re introduced to Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) and his purpose in life. Apparently, the Catholic church has within its ranks a secret society charged with ridding the world of the nasty creatures that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and Van Helsing is their main offense.

After returning to home base, arguing with his superior and getting armed with some fancy new weapons, Bond - I mean, Van Helsing - heads out on his latest assignment: he’s to travel to Transylvania to help end recent disturbances attributed to the forces of evil. Joined by his trusty sidekick Carl (David Wenham), he arrives and immediately gets caught up in the battle when Dracula’s three brides attack the village. Things don’t get any easier when, later that night, a werewolf tries to kill Ana (Kate Beckinsale), leading her and Van Helsing to a plot cooked up by Dracula himself to populate the world with his offspring by using certain unique attributes of the Frankenstein monster. The rest of the movie is chock full with chases, fights and monsters, but kind of thin on logic.

Director Sommers scored a limp bulls-eye with The Mummy movies - high-adventure, low-brow fables that nonetheless had a sense of fun and humor about them. Van Helsing has none of this. The script, also by Sommers, is weak and full of holes, and the writing is truly bad.

Hugh Jackman is suitable for the role, which is essentially a 19^th Century take on his Wolverine character from X-Men, right down to the forgotten past and seeming immortality. He growls and grumbles and fights like hell, but the character is too one-note for him to be able to do anything else. Nice costume too, stolen directly from the Japanese anime classic Vampire Hunter D. Kate Beckinsale sure looks pretty in an outfit that would asphyxiate a normally proportioned woman - I guess she liked her clothes from Underworld so much that she kept them. She does what she’s expected to do: look good, shoot vampires and play the damsel in distress. No big whoop, but that accent got annoying real quick. Richard Roxburgh as Dracula tries his best, but saddled under the inane direction of Sommers and the disappointing fact that he’s sorely miscast, his performance is too camp to be scary, too broad to be taken seriously; this is the part that pissed me off more than any other. He’s Dracula for God’s sake, he’s supposed to be the personification of dread; a fearful mix of terrifying elegance and undead supremacy, James Bond by way of Lucifer. Instead he comes off as the physical embodiment of the “I vaaant to suck your blood” routine that every kid does when they’re 6 years old. An epic shout out of ‘Boo!’ also has to be directed at Dracula’s brides. Were they trying to deliver their lines this poorly, or was it just bad luck on a galactic scale? Unintentionally hilarious.

Distractions abound, and there are way too many credibility gaps to keep track of - how come a werewolf breaks into a house by gingerly climbing through a tiny, unlocked window, but then jumps through a friggin’ wall when he has to escape? Why is there enough rope-swinging to make Tarzan feel like a sedentary layabout? And how come werewolves change back to human form when the moon is covered by clouds but not when they’re inside, and vampires can come out in the day, but only if they stay in the shade? 600 years of entrenched supernatural folklore out the window in order to drive the skimpy plot along. Boo again!

Of course, $200 million couldn’t be totally thrown away by even the most talented of people, and to that end, there are a few worthwhile moments, despite the ginsu editing and near total lack of color. This is, of course, a special effects movie, and they are done very well. Nice landscapes, great castles and some beautiful transformation effects. The one truly impressive scene in the film is actually completely CGI - a throw-down, drag-out fight to the death between a werewolf and a vampire. It’s exactly as it should be - ferocious, destructive and potent. Too bad they didn’t spend a bit of extra dosh on the script.

Unfortunately, Van Helsing is a textbook example of Hollywood hoping that the money reaped will be proportionate to how much extra crap they managed to stuff the script with. A pixilated pile of special effects that hides the remnants of a script under it’s mass, it has it’s moments, but they’re few and (very) far between. Watch if you dare. Me, I’m going to cleanse myself holy water-style by watching Bram Stoker’s Dracula and then powering up my Playstation for a few vampire-killing hours of Castlevania.

Movie Reviews