Best of the Dracule but...

Rating: 9/10 (20 February 2005)

This is a marvelous film and Gary Oldman's is the outstanding Dracula performance, though he is ably abetted by tremendous special effects. The rest of the cast is likewise first-rate, and I would include Keenu Reeves' Harker, despite some problems, which some are too quick I feel to put on Mr. Reeves' acting abilities. In fact, he's handicapped by the script which creates a rather strange situation in which his wife, Mina, the reincarnation of the noble Princess of the Dracule, Elisabeta, is willing to betray the memory of her murdered friend Lucy, the valiant men trying to save her, and her own long-suffering husband in order to embrace eternal death with the fiend Dracula. Who, we are given to understand is not as hampered in his tormented existence as in the Stoker novel. He has retained the ability to understand right and wrong and made his choice after his wife's untimely suicide.
In a final confrontation after Dracula receives his death wound, having pulled a gun on poor Harker, she, having chosen Dracula and an Unlife of murder and blood lust, demands he tell her if he will kill her as he has Dracula and Lucy's vampire. Harker is forced by the script to say that he would not...Though of course it would be an act of love to save her soul, one her so-called 'loving' Dracula is apparently not capable of. Had Reeves been allowed to give Harker some bite, call Mina on her actions, and set his love for her soul against Dracula's lust to make her his undead consort, I think the role would have been far more impressive.