Van Helsing is a film difficult to review. I’ve spent days wondering how I’m supposed to start off this… review… about this movie, but I haven’t really come to a conclusion, so I’m just going to explain my difficulty with it before I start writing about it.

I heard about this flick at the Super Bowl, which is where I’m sure everybody heard of it. I wasn’t so sure about it- it was one of those movies that had the potential to be good, but it looked kinda cheesy, and gave away what one would assume to be some of the endings (like in the trailer, when Van Helsing loads the Wolf Man with silver bullets right before he gets tackled). Then, a few months later, on aintitcool.com, bad reviews start pouring in. Two reports came about a screening in which one guy in the back yelled, “This movie sucks nuts!”, and it gained the film’s loudest applause. Wouldn’t that tell you something about it?

Then, a few people start really loving the movie. Knowles himself, of Ain’t It Cool News, was a big fan, as were a few readers of his site. So, I figured, after reading some reviews, if I didn’t take it very seriously, I’d have a good time.

This technique worked for about the first… fifteen minutes. There’s a very intentionally cheesy scene at the beginning, done in black and white to pay an interesting homage to the horror flicks from back in the day. That scene is kind of funny. And pretty good in its homage (though Quentin Tarantino could have done better). But after that… eh… I guess, even if it paying homage, Van Helsing really just starts to over do it. Things you would assume to just be the director screwing around are beat over your head so much that you don’t know how seriously to take them. The best example I can think of is Dracula’s three brides. They’re horrible. They have this ridiculous laugh and style to them that makes you smile whenever one of them inevitably dies. When you first hear their laugh, and watch them fly, you assume its just Sommers (the director) having fun, but he makes them act like this in scenes that are supposed sort of serious, and it doesn’t work at all. I’m not going to recommend this movie, and the Brides are a key factor in that decision (and that decision wasn’t very hard).

“The Mummy” and “The Mummy Returns” were fun movies. I liked them both, especially the first one. But even while you were having fun, you still cared about the characters so much to where you’d be devastated to see one of them killed, and people got very involved in the movies when one of their lives is in danger. I didn’t find it so with “Van Helsing”- the only person I liked a lot was the friar, and he’s not put into many life-threatening situations. This film’s mix of formula is its biggest problem: if you’re going to make a movie which has a guy going around and kicking the crap out of three notorious horror figures (Frankenstein, Wolf Man, and Dracula), you have two options: make it a spoof, or make it a totally bad-@$$, no screwing around action flick. “Van Helsing” tries to pull off both of these, and left me hopelessly confused.

So Sommers is to blame. He has made a failure of a film by doing it in such a wrong way. However, if there’s anything I can give him credit for, its for doing some of the action scenes pretty well- the “James Bond” type scene where Van Helsing is introduced to all types of medieval machinery is neat, and I liked, to some degree, watching most of the fight scenes (the climax is particularly interesting).

If there’s anything that makes the movie likable to any degree, it’s the performances. Roxburgh, who plays Dracula, obviously thought he was supposed to be in an all-out spoof, and does plays it like he is. This approach at least makes you smile. I don’t happen to think Hugh Jackman is too talented an actor, but at least he’s good at being p*ssed off, which is what Van Helsing often is. And everybody has to praise David Wenham as Carl the Friar, who I hope will be put into some good roles after this movie.

But, all taken into account, Van Helsing kind of sucks.

“that’s the way it is...” –Some 80’s Song

Rating: D+

Recommended: No