Why Keanu , Mr Coppolla?.

Rating: 7/10 (18 May 2006)

Francis Ford Coppola adapts the book Dracula for the modern audience. The film is beautiful to look at in places, the costumes worn by Dracula and the women in the film are wonderful. The set pieces are also worth applauding, referencing the Dracula films that came before it, Coppola does a fine job of creating a victorian england and a wild pre-communist, superstition ruled Transylvannia. Gary Oldman is one of the finest character actors working in movies these days and seems to work far too infrequently ,even in trash ( Lost in Space) he is a standout. In this movie he does a good job of portraying the tortured, cursed count in all his incarnations. The Counts various manifestations are the best movie effects can offer, from a dessicated Count, to a huge bat like creature to a werewolf all are frighteningly realistic. Anthony Hopkins is an excellent actor and brings his usual intelligent gravitas to the role of Van Helsing. Keanuu Reeves however, ruins most of the movie for me, he is a terrible actor, after some twenty years in Hollywood movies he hasn't improved one iota and still performs with cue card timidity and paper thin characterisation. He simply doesn't have the ability to perform as anything other than a pretty face. No doubt he was a studio choice to get the women and teenage girls in to see a horror movie they otherwise may not have chosen to see. Francis Ford Copploa does a good job here and unleashes the repressed erotoscism of the original novel. He also seems to use every director trick in the book from speding up frames, to slowing them down, to reversing the action to playing it at half speed in an attempt to disorient the viewer in to accepting a dreamlike, nightmarish world of the vampire. In summary it is a visually impressive film with excellent performances and intelligently directed. But ruined by the casting of Hollywood pin-up Keanu Reeves.