Van Helsing: (or the reason why I'm not going to catch the new G.I. Joe movie)

It was recently brought to my attention that, for the most part, I give high marks to most of the films I review. I guess I've had the good fortune to watch good movies so far but trust me, I do not intend to rubber stamp every film that I run across. By a bizarre coincidence (go figure), the film I'm about to discuss is one of those that deserves to be thrown under the bus. And that's a shame because it's directed by the guy who directed the soon to be release G.I. Joe movie.

Written and directed by the same man, Stephen Sommers, who created The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, Van Helsing is the story of a man without a past who roams the earth ridding it of monsters. After successfully dealing with one, the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde monster, in the beginning Van Helsing and his weapons man Karl are sent to Transylvania to hunt down Dracula and protect a local princess named Anna. Not only does Van Helsing have to deal with Dracula, but his three brides, Frankenstein, Igor, and the Wolf Man as well (I guess the Invisible Man and the Mummy were busy elsewhere and couldn’t get in on the action).

For all the millions of dollars spent on this film one would believe that the special effects would look spectacular, but this is not the case. It’s hard to be scared of monsters that look many pixels short of completion. Sommers ran into this same problem with the effects work in The Mummy Returns but apparently didn’t see fit to tell the effects guys to correct it. There was no coherence to the story. The characters and any kind of backstory or relationships they may have were never really explored due to the time needed for the next bit of action. We are told of Van Helsing’s mission but never really understand why Dracula was doing what he was doing. And any flow the story started to develop was bogged down by big, loud action pieces with bad CGI. Some people, myself included, might object to the misuse of the monsters in the film. Sommers was given free reign to use most of the Universal (movie studio) monsters but never should have been for he twisted the classic characters that most people recognize into bad caricatures. Dracula became some Eurotrash wiener who’d rather do his best Lionel Ritchie impersonation of walking on the ceiling rather than emote evil. One wonders if he’d scare a five year old. Frankenstein was turned into a pontificating wuss. He spent most of his time on screen quoting the Bible or whining about how “all is lost.” It felt as if Sommers had all of these great ideas for action pieces in mind and wanted to get them all into the final cut but he forgot that he needed to have a story that could match his vision. The utter ridiculousness of the story, lousy dialogue and amateurish special effects make this move a big waste of time and one prays that it's not the same for G.I. Joe (but if you've seen the trailer, you're pretty much resigned to the fact that it is).

Grade: D