Melodrama with a capital 'M' darling

Rating: 7/10 (15 November 2011)

Dracula's success rides on three things:
1) The strength of Oldman's performance, which reaches almost superhuman depths. 2) The romantic re-telling of Stoker's classic story. 3) The lush, heady art direction which permeates the brain like an opium-induced stupor.
The sexual intonations of Stoker's original plot are brought to the forefront here. Coppolla's film is more a bourgeois erotic fantasy with a supernatural backdrop, but it is so visually splendid that it is impossible not to be swept away with it.
Of course it has it's flaws, the most notable being the unforgivable miscasting of Keanu Reeves as Jonathan, who doesn't seem to understand the words coming out of his mouth and acts as though he warped straight out of 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'. His scenes are cringe-worthy. Winona Ryder, while not as bad, is similarly unconvincing with a British accent that would be tolerable only in an 8th grade school play.
The other members of the cast are admirable. Oldman literally sucks the scenery dry and oscillates masterfully between ice cold malevolence and warm passionate tenderness. Hopkins is comedic camp as Professor Van Helsing. Sadie Frost is scintillatingly cheeky as the precocious Lucy. Tom Waits is hysterical as Renfield. And Monica Belucci's breasts are divinely inspired.
A flawed classic.