Atrocious!

Rating: 1/10 (8 March 2007)

I adore the original classic novel by Bram Stoker and looked forward with relish to see Francis Ford Coppola's take on it, but the end result is a total disaster. Despite incorporating the author's name in the title, the end result is far from the author's original work in both tone and content. Technically, the film is beautiful. The visual effects are eye-catching, the cinematography is lush and the score is moody in a way that thoroughly evades the remainder of the film. This film adds some of the characters from the novel absent from earlier film incarnations, but as the result is irrelevancy it seems pointless. The biggest disaster is in the film's vision of Dracula. The opening attempts to tie him in with the legend of Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for the character but something Stoker never actually did in the novel. It also introduces a "tragic" love story completely missing from the novel and for good reason - it sucks big time. Apparently, there is some unspoken rule in vampire films now that the focal creature of the night must be a romantic figure - so instead of Stoker's vermin-like embodiment of pure evil, we end up with an undead Heathcliff. Gary Oldman, initially plastered into old man make-up and sporting a thick Romanian accent that garbles most of his lines, metamorphoses into an 18th century ZZ Top member and fails to generate either chills or elicit sympathy. Winona Ryder, as the object of his affection, has never been more ravishing, but the screenplay cannot decide whether she should be frightened or be a heroine from a grade-Z bodice-ripper, lustfully inserting "Oh, my love" as every other line. The normally reliable Anthony Hopkins is a laughable ham as the venerable Van Helsing, and the less said about the remainder of the cast, including the hapless Keanu Reeves in a nothing part, the better. Coppola's visual style is also off-putting and takes one consistently out of the setting. Honestly, was he directing a film or an MTV video? And was that werewolf creature actually raping that woman? Ughh! By the time Ryder does a wild gypsy dance to bring on the night quicker and tearfully puts her beloved out of his misery, you are ready to drive a stake through all of them, especially the director and the screenwriter.