Slow and boring

Rating: Null/10 (20 February 2003)

I really expected this to be better. It had a lot of good things going for it. Good cast, with the exception of Keanu Reeves, good director, a good story to work from. But even with all that, I found it to be very boring. That could be blamed on the fact that Dracula is one of the most told stories in cinematic history, with tons of versions. But still, it could have been done much better. The action, what little there was, was severely lagging, and the acting talent was pretty much wasted. However, it did have some very nicely done cinematography that was pretty interesting to watch, and the make-up effects were cool.
Gary Oldman as Dracula. That alone sounds like it'll make a good movie to me. I mean, he's the man of a thousand evil faces. And while he did a good job, it wasn't enough to save the movie. And neither was Anthony Hopkins, playing Van Helsing. I'm convinced you could put Hopkins in anything and make the movie better. He could make a Barney movie better. So I have to think that Dracula was a pure fluke. So had to have been casting Bill and Ted's Ted as Jonathan Harker. Let me speak for everyone when I say, `Huh?' I've always liked Winona Ryder, and I liked her in this, too, as much as I could anyway. Most of the time I was just being bored.
Francis Ford Coppola he did The Godfather, and even better, The Godfather, Part 2. Then he did Godfather 3 and that just went straight to hell. But still, this is a guy whose done good movies wait; he also executive produced Jeepers Creepers Okay, so maybe the guy's starting to loose it in his old age, but this was back in '92 which was the movie he did right after Godfather 3 wait a minute, maybe this isn't such a surprise. Also, he did start his career working with/for Roger Corman. Ok, mystery solved.
Then we have the story, Dracula. Sure it's been done repeatedly, it was even one of the very first movies ever made (as Nosferatu). There's obviously something good here, if it's being done so much. So how come this version, with all the things that say it should be good, is so damn boring? Maybe because it's two hours and ten minutes long. Well, Fellowship of the Ring was even longer and that kept me on the edge of my seat, even the second time I saw it. Maybe it's just cause somehow they messed up the flow of the movie and they had a lot of stuff going on, but nothing actually happening.
Most of the time, when I do reviews, I talk about the good aspects of the movie for three paragraphs and toss in all the bad stuff in the last one. This is a reversal of my usual way of going about things. So, what good things were there in Bram Stoker's Dracula? Well, through a lot of the movie, there was a lot of really cool camera work. But even that tends to get overdone after a little while, and near the end of the movie, it just disappears. The make-up effects were another good thing about it. They transform Gary Oldman from young, to old, to a wolf-man, to a bat-man, to headless. But of course, it's like any other movie Gary Oldman's in. He never was the same look twice.
Overall: From everything I heard about this movie, I figured it would be great. My uncle told me that after the opening credits, it all went downhill, and he was right. It's more of a weird, long, boring love story then any kind of horror movie. It's worth maybe borrowing from a friend to check out once, but that's about it.