A mix of bad and good...

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2001)

I'll start with the bad first, because it will take a little longer and I like getting unpleasantries out of the way quickly. The most obvious problem with the film is the cast. Never have I seen so many miscastings in a single Hollywood production, and that is really saying a lot. For example, Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves in any film set in Victorian England is a big, big mistake. The two look so out of place that it really destroys the whole illusion within one shot. Give their roles to people like Helena Bonham Carter and John Cusack, people who are actually capable of acting, and the results would have been quite a long way better. Then there's all the nonsense with Dracula's ability to appear as mist, a wolf, or a total of five different things during the film. This really made it difficult to understand what on Earth we are supposed to be afraid of. The use of religion in the film as a plot device was a minus, too. Just watch the behaviour of the "good" Christian boys throughout the film and see if you'll still wonder why a lot of audiences root for the vampires in these films.
The new introduction describing Prince Vlad's life was a nice touch in spite of it not being at all part of the novel, however. For once, it is nice to be shown the sort of atrocity the bible inspires on the big screen, even if it is still very inaccurately described. The rest of the film is faithful to Bram Stoker's original novel in a way that no other film has accomplished. Rather than presenting some hokey vision of the original legend revolving around bad actors in cloaks and tepid women who are only interesting as props, they presented the vampire legend as Bram Stoker saw it. The women in the film are powerful, interesting characters, the big vampire lord himself has a reason for the things he does, and the fear or fanatacism in the so-called "heroes" is there to be seen in plain colour. Anthony Hopkins does a brilliant job of making his character seem like one of two evils, while Gary Oldman injects a depth into Prince Vlad that has never been achieved in cinema before. As he mopes about his castle, searching for the lost love of his life that was so cruelly taken from him (and let's not forget how cruelly the salt was rubbed into the wounds by those so-called good church boys), one begins to understand his pain and anger. Which is why the ending works so much better here than it does in the novel. Bram Stoker's novel simply has the men staking Dracula and cutting his head off... no cop outs like that in Francis' film. He uses this as an opportunity to fully resolve the painful conflicts that made Dracula what he is.
Were I making this film again, I'd do everything Francis Ford Coppola had done, with some small adjustments. First of all, I would get better actors to play Jonathan and Mina, because actors like Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder seriously lack the depth to play anything other than stock American youth stereotypes. Even though Natalie Portman clearly doesn't look old enough to play Mina Harker, she'd wipe the floor with Winona Ryder simply because she is capable of getting into character. I am not sure if I would have cast Anthony Hopkins... if I did, I would give him strict instructions to cut out the overacting. And I would have changed the script a lot to deemphasise the religious overtone. It wasn't that strong in Bram Stoker's novel, and raising it this far in the film was disrespectful. People have already learned (often with the help of such cults) that real-life, everyday evil blows away what can be portrayed on the screen. Removing it altogether would have eliminated the lack of sympathy one feels for the characters. Other than that, I would have done everything pretty much the same. Maybe they should have let Kenneth Branagh direct this one too?
In all, I'm giving Dracula six out of ten. While it is mostly faithful to the novel in a good way, the additional religious mumbo-jumbo that was inserted in the screenplay just bogs it down, and the casting agents should have known better. The overuse of special effects in portraying five different Draculas was also a bad idea. Still, I think people should focus more on what they did get right, and this is without a doubt the closest we've ever gotten to seeing the real Dracula on-screen.