director/screenwriter
Stephen Sommers
based on
characters created by
Bram Stoker
Mary Shelley
Robert Louis Stevenson
producers
Bob Ducsay
Stephen Sommers
cinematographer
Terry Stacey
music
Allen Daviau
editors
Bob Ducsay
Kelly Matsumoto
cast
Hugh Jackman (Van Helsing)
Kate Beckinsale (Anna Valerious)
Richard Roxburgh (Count Dracula)
David Wenham (Carl)
Shuler Hensley (Frankenstein's Monster)
Elena Anaya (Aleera)
Will Kemp (Velkan)
Kevin J. O'Connor (Igor)
Silvia Colloca (Verona)
Josie Maran (Marishka)
Samuel West (Dr. Victor Frankenstein)
Robbie Coltrane (voice of Mr. Hyde)
Stephen H. Fisher (Dr. Jekyll)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 132m
u.s.
release: May 7, 2004
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other stephen
sommers films
reviewed on this website:
- the
mummy
- the
mummy returns
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The best thing Van Helsing
has done for the classic Universal monster movies was to inspire
the studio to re-issue the old Dracula, Frankenstein,
and Wolf Man DVDs. The worst thing Van Helsing
does for those movies is Van Helsing. Despite the
negative advance word, I really wanted to love this film; the
thought of writer/director Stephen Sommers (who made the two
fun, hyperactive Mummy
movies) tackling those icons of fear, with legendary vampire
hunter Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) at the forefront, sounded at
best like a king-hell monster mash and at worst like a so-cheesy-it's-great
warm-weather blowout. It's neither, unfortunately, despite a
promising start.
The Universal logo dims into
black-and-white, catches fire, and becomes a torch held by a
member of a mob converging on Castle Frankenstein. Okay, you
have me at hello. As the sequence goes on, and we learn that
Dr. Frankenstein is in cahoots with Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh),
something troubling may occur to you: This isn't true
black-and-white. Though the film's expert cinematographer (Allen
Daviau) is certainly capable of achieving a '30s-monster-movie
look, the images seem to have been shot in color and then wiped
of the color -- they're not lighted for b&w photography.
Where are the shadows, the mystery?
Stephen Sommers has assembled
a fanboy's geek dream of a monster team-up -- we used to see
matches like this in Marvel comics of the '70s, where Dracula
and Werewolf-By-Night had a smackdown -- and turned it into a
charmless video game. Van Helsing himself, played by Jackman
without an ounce of fun or awareness that the movie is ludicrous,
is an efficient avatar of carnage, scowling as he sends vampires
to Hell. Didn't Sommers remember that all the previous screen
Van Helsings -- the list includes Peter Cushing, Laurence Olivier,
and Anthony Hopkins -- were occasions for delicious overplaying?
Sommers and Jackman treat the character as if he were a Shakespearean
role played by those actors.
Richard Roxburgh has taken
some lumps for his hammy version of Dracula, but he's the only
thing worth watching. Murderously fey, as if given three vampire
brides just to prove his heterosexuality, Roxburgh's Dracula
floats around the sets, howling or purring with menace. It's
fitting that Roxburgh performed roughly the same function in
Moulin
Rouge -- understanding how daffy the material was and
running with it -- because Van Helsing is dangerously
close to being the Moulin Rouge of monster movies (which
I don't mean as a compliment, for those of you who dug Moulin
Rouge). Roxburgh's scenes with Kevin J. O'Connor as a nasty,
ironic Igor point towards the campy comedy this should've been.
Instead, we get far too much
lashing and bashing -- monsters pummeling each other, thrown
through concrete walls; human beings (including Kate Beckinsale
in her second lame monster film after Underworld)
surviving falls and impacts that would kill a grizzly bear. Dracula's
brides hardly have time to be poisonously sexy -- they're too
busy morphing into winged harpies and swooping through the air,
dodging Van Helsing's bursts of automatic crossbow arrows. Frankenstein's
monster is more or less used like the Hulk or the Thing (Marvel
Comics version); Mr. Hyde makes a computer-generated appearance
(after this and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I never
want to see this character again), and he smashes and
bashes, too. A lycanthrope character is similarly, boringly destructive.
The problem with Van Helsing isn't that it's a dumb monster
party compiling Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and the Wolf
Man; it's that it isn't that movie. This is just an overamped
action movie in which the legendary monsters are interchangeable
with any other brutish CGI beasts. Stephen Sommers may have loved
the old Universal monster movies, but he certainly doesn't seem
to have understood them.
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