Too much for its own good

Rating: 4/10 (26 December 2006)

After the first 20 minutes, you have had quite an impression of how the rest of the movie is gonna be. What works in a novel is not automatically right for a movie. I've read the novel and it was the only one ever to bring me nightmares, just with its sophisticated way of telling and explaining. The horror is hidden, crouching, spiteful. In a nutshell, quite amazing.
But the movie is a poor piece of trying but not achieving. Coppola made THE GODFATHER, one of the two 9.1 of this website. But this here is a great disappointment.
Why? Because they try to stay close to the book. Fine. Dracula is described as an old but strong man with hairy hands and a big nose. They did this here. But at this point it seems they've stopped to stay by the book and started to do their own flick. I can't recall that Dracula had some kind of a relationship with Mina others than his desire to drink her blood and make her his slave. Then this crap with Renfield. In the book, he escapes and fights with the strength of five man, just to have his spine snapped like a twig by Dracula a few pages later. Here, we see a whole different type. He also only eats one fly. If you start with it, you should go with it and not just drop it, because the movie gets to long even without this feature of it.
Lucy, the charming, beautiful and truly happy Lady Westenra appears here as a man-eating slut. Abraham Van Helsing, the sophisticated, strong, dauntless scientist is a crazy, weird and jumpy old fart, who can't even keep himself from kissing obsessed Mina. The three men in Lucy's life appear as shallow punks, hard to distinguish by their appearances or by their behaviors, but never to be taken as full breathing and feeling beings. Mina Harker, the good heart in the story, whose loyalty to her beloved Jonathan can't be shaken by evil powers is here the reincarnation of Dracula's old bride and actually in love with him! With him! If that's not crap, what is?
Last but not least, Dracula. It is true that Gary Oldman can fill a cinema screen with his charisma as the deep and bad villain. But here, he is not a former butcher, who killed whoever stood into his path, here he is the disenchanted lover, who lost his bride and can't bear loving a faith anymore, which bans his one love into eternal damnation just because she took her own life. This is just not the way it is in the book! Fine, do your own thing but don't claim to stick with something and just don't do it then. That's not the way to make things.
There's no horror in this movie, if you don't consider a poorly made wannabe-werewolf, a guy in a spandex-bat-suit, ridiculously green smoke and stupidly obvious shadow-plays to be horror. The scene with the wolf was a bit creepy, so was the man of rats and Renfield had the potential to be a scary character but they didn't make anything out of that.
Coppola tried to create horror by showing everything instead of just leaving hints like for example in HALLOWEEN, but he failed to show really scary images and so the whole movie appears like a colorful children's birthday. It simply doesn't work at all. It's not even especially nice styled or designed. They tried to copy Tim Burton throughout but never reached his class. The castle is a mistaken effort to build a memorable building, the Westenra Mansion is an annoying piece of architecture and, sorry to say so, but the costumes, which earned several awards, look like they were taken from the local Halloween spooky shop. It's more of a Scooby-Doo film than a true Dracula movie.
It's waste of talent, time and money.
Stick with HORROR OF Dracula with the incomparable Christopher Lee, THE GODFATHER trilogy and APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX. Forget this embarrassment.