Bram Stoker's Dracula is not all it's made out to be

Rating: 2/10 (2 April 2006)

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a masterpiece of a disaster. The movie lures the viewer in with brilliant cinematography and a lack of vampire jokes, and then tears apart the novel with horrible casting, bad direction, insufferable costuming, flimsy plots and utterly senseless decisions in everything while the viewer watches without a complaint, transfixed by the cinematography.
If you like the novel at all, you will detest this movie. It goes with the idea of having a romance between Dracula and the young woman Mina Harker. But instead of actually using the real characters from the book and creating a believable romance, they mangle both the characters to force them into a relationship that is realistic for neither of them. The casting of the insipid Winona Ryder as Mina does not help them. The whole romance plays around the idea of Mina being the reincarnation of Dracula's wife, who killed herself. The dynamic between them runs along the lines of "Well, I lost you in that life, for I'm coming for you now." "Oh, my Prince...what were you saying again?"
The secondary characters are also quite lacking. Keeanau Reeves plays Jonathan Harker, Mina's husband, with absolutely no emotion at all when necessary, and far too much emotion when it is not necessary. It is hard to believe he did not act this horribly on purpose.
Sadie Frost plays a Lucy that may be completely unrecognizable to readers of the novel, though this I blame on the director, for Frost does well in what she seems to have been instructed to do. The scene in which Dracula arrives in England, a rain filled night when everyone seems to go insanely, with Dracula deciding that becoming a sort of wolf-human hybrid, Mina and Lucy deciding that they are bisexual, and Lucy developing a taste for wolf- human hybrids, may make this clear enough to anyone who chooses to dare watching this movie.
There is one advantage (other then the cinematography, of course) to this movie, and that is the chance to see Anthony Hopkins play the most interesting, slightly disturbing, and bizarrely close to the novel Van Helsing ever seen in a Dracula movie. So, if you want to risk watching the movie, I would advise skipping through the beginning and only watching the scenes with Van Helsing.