This Dracula bites

Rating: 4/10 (5 March 2007)

Francis Ford Coppola's version of Dracula is a curious thing. The movie is faithful to the book's storyline, sure, but it completely subverts the morality of the book at the same time. So, in the end, I'd have to say that it's not really faithful at all.
The trouble is that the book is pretty conservative, and this movie is not. Dracula is not depicted as a romantic hero by Stoker, nor is the count a sexual liberator of repressed young Victorian girls. He's a demon parasite, basically, and he corrupts Mina and Lucy, he doesn't free them from the confines of their society or show them the true meaning of love. Therefore, the whole thread in this movie about Mina being Dracula's long-lost wife is clumsily grafted onto the source material, and it's clearly not at all what Stoker intended.
Even if you can ignore the original book and its old-time morality, this movie is still lame. In addition to being unfaithful, the romantic storyline is ridiculously over-the-top and corny. I think Winona Ryder is terrible as Mina - passionless and dull - and she doesn't generate any heat with Gary Oldman. Speaking of heat, I don't think Oldman is as attractive as Frank Langella, nor is he as mysterious as Bela Lugosi or as imposing as Christopher Lee. In other words, Oldman makes a pretty poor Dracula, and watching him traipse around Victorian London in a goofy top-hat and blue-tinted sunglasses is sad indeed. So much for the Prince of Darkness, huh?
The rest of the casting is pretty bad, too. Keanu Reeves is, like everyone says, painfully wooden as Harker. Richard E. Grant and Tom Waits, meanwhile, hit the total opposite end of the spectrum and ham it up like crazy. Worst of all, though, is Anthony Hopkins as a kind of perverse, religious lunatic version of Van Helsing. The character is supposed to be, y'know, a beacon of morality or something - not an old pervert who enjoys hacking up young women. In the book, Lucy and Mina are quite fond of him; in this movie, they're creeped out by his weirdness. And who can blame them?
One of these days, I suppose somebody will make a definitive version of Dracula, but this ain't it. The BBC's 1977 "Count Dracula" is much more faithful than this over-the-top nonsense; meanwhile, 1958's "Horror of Dracula" is a lot more fun (and spiritually faithful to the book), and Werner Herzog's 1979 version of "Nosferatu" is quite poetic and beautiful. All of these films are more satisfying to me than Coppola's bloody awful mess.