Bram Stoker spinning wildly in his grave!

Rating: 1/10 (8 June 1999)

It is called "Bram Stoker's Dracula." The title is deceiving.
This film is an incoherent mess, to put it rather bluntly.
The effects, which look beautiful, only take away from the story-- you forget that this is a vampire movie and you are left with an impression that it is a special effects promo. And for crying out loud, what is with that tagline "Love Never Dies?" This film has taken a classic story and mutated it into a romance. Granted, there were huge romantic elements in the original Dracula-- the gothic horror classics such as it and Frankenstein flowed elegantly like poetry, and romance was used. But this film has taken something that Bram Stoker never intended and made it the key focus: Mina is now a riencarnation of a lover who Dracula lost while still Vlad the Impaler, and the whole film is basically an endless trek as they find each other and rediscover their lost love. OOOOKAY!
As far as events in the book goes, it is pretty accurate, but that's not the point. The point is, they completely changed the focus on some kind of unnesseccary love story. If Coppola had made the film an accurate account of the legend, it would have worked great. If he had changed the title from "Bram Stoker's", I might have liked it a little better (Even though the endless effects, as I have mentioned, made it mind-numbing and incoherent). Instead, it is only boring, tedious, and an insult to everything Bram Stoker hoped to accomplish. Poor Mr. Stoker....If he knew such trash like this would come out of his work, I'm sure he would have never written it.
If you want to see a good Dracula film, watch the Klause Kinski version of Nosferatu. It certainly isn't faithful to the novel, but at least it doesn't PRETEND to be, like this sorry excuse for a Dracula epic does.
I would give this film a negative two hundred on a scale of one to ten, if not for Anthony Hopkin's brilliant performance as Van Helsing. Truly, he's the only brillaint thing about it.