Dra-kool-ya!

Rating: 3/10 (15 January 2010)

Once upon a time Francis Ford Coppola bankrupted his studio (Zoetrope) introducing some interesting computer effects in a dud of a movie (One from the Heart); but for this pass on the defacto vampire story, he tired of those effects and instead pursued lurid, over-the-top artifice for its own sake. The sets and costumes are stagey and theatrical; and that's the better part of the endeavor. For about half an hour (near the beginning) the movie holds some promise, due to the excellent, strange, imaginative stuff you're being shown (Oldman plays the Count as an over the top empress dowager). But the movie suffers exactly where the Dracula story always does; Jonathan in Transylvania is interesting and eerie. But once the story moves back home to middle-class England, nothing can save it. Characters standing around drawing rooms, figuring out things every audience member already knows about vampires, is impossibly dull; in every single version of this tale.
When it comes to mechanics (Oldman wheeled across a room, licking a razor, shadows performed by a second actor) Coppola is intriguing, but when it comes to effects, compositing, film technology, backwards sequences, editing and script it's all a bag of clichés. The story never deepens or concerns you. The characters never get past two-dimensionality. And all the Dutch angles in the world can't make an exhausted story interesting. The last hour is a seriously uninteresting, half-hearted slog.
The Dracula tale is stale from over-repetition but somehow the movies still get bankrolled. What possible dramatic interest can be plumbed from newb-characters learning what a vampire is? Even with Coppola's gloss on Victorian sexuality and sex-borne pathogens it not interesting. The original Renfield from 1933 is still way creepier than Tom Waits decent effort. Scenes and ideas are lifted straight from other movies (Zentropa, Manhunter)