Stephen Sommers, the writer-director who inflicted The Mummy Returns on us in 2001, has evidently decided that hacking a single classic monster movie to pieces isn’t enough. In Van Helsing, Sommers offers up an “homage” to all three of Universal’s canonical creature features: Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man. The result is like Frankenstein’s monster in a china shop.
In fact, any resemblance to the Universal films is strictly limited to the black-and-white opening sequence, in which Frankenstein brings his creation to life while angry villagers storm his castle. Oh, there are plenty of other allusions thrown in haphazardly throughout the film—including The Wolf Man‘s oft-quoted “wolfsbane” poem—but they stand out so glaringly as allusions that their only purpose is to give horror hipsters something to alleviate the boredom every now and then.
When we first meet the title character, he’s just tracked down a ludicrous computer-generated Mr. Hyde that looks like a casting reject from Shrek. This isn’t the professorial Van Helsing familiar to readers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; instead, it’s X-Men star Hugh Jackman with a long leather coat, a sour disposition and a Vatican-issued license to kill iconic movie monsters. Van Helsing’s problem is that every time he kills another monster, he also kills the human alter ego—a fact that doesn’t sit well with either his conscience or the general public.
With a name like Van Helsing, you know it won’t be long before he’s dispatched to Transylvania. There he runs into Anna Valerious (Underworld vixen Kate Beckinsale), who along with her brother is the last descendant of a hero who had faced Dracula centuries earlier. The two then try to sort out the mystery of Dracula’s weakness during the brief moments when they aren’t engaging in what the MPAA likes to call “stylized action violence.”
It’s probably useless to hope for great villains in something this dumb, but Van Helsing fails to provide even good ones. Richard Roxburgh’s Dracula is an ill-advised nod to Udo Kier in Blood for Dracula, and the computer-animated Wolf Man is never remotely convincing. Dracula’s three “brides” are on hand, but they spend most of the time as blue harpies who launch air strikes on Anna’s small village while shrieking the worst Transylvanian dialogue since Count Chocula. The only performance worth mentioning is that of Shuler Hensley, who somehow salvages scraps of the Frankenstein monster’s antiheroic pathos out of the wreckage.
All of this campy crapola might have worked if Sommers were capable of bringing any sort of postmodern originality to the monster-movie genre (in the way that Baz Luhrmann, for example, has done with the musical). Unfortunately, Sommers has the storytelling skill of a seven-year-old, and the influences to match. The tedious effects-ridden mayhem owes a lot more to the Castlevania videogame series than it does to anything starring Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff.
But what really hurts this film isn’t Sommers’ choice of influences; it’s the way he tries to showcase all of them at once. Heedless of trifling matters like plot incoherence and anachronism, he clogs the film with everything from the egg chamber in Alien to Bond-esque gadgetry. (Van Helsing’s monkish sidekick supplies him with such common nineteenth-century weaponry as spinning saw blades and a fully automatic crossbow.) At no time does Sommers ever provide anything remotely interesting, except a vague sense of wonder that three films as good as those Universal classics could inspire something as bad as this.
(1/4)