Boring, Ugly Mess

Rating: Null/10 (13 October 2012)

Van Helsing (2004)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
Monster hunter Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) goes to Transylvania where he plans to sit on his couch and play video games. Wait, scratch that. Monster hunter Van Helsing heads off to Transylvania to destroy Count Dracula, the werewolf, Frankenstein's monster and a bunch of flying CGI vampire women. VAN HELSING is a really bad film. I'm not even going to try and compare it to Universal's Golden Age of monsters and I don't think anyone else should either. We're living in a different age so anyone going into this film expecting to see Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were just bound for a disappointment. What's so maddening about this film is that apparently the director is a fan of monsters and yet he delivers a really bad, really boring mess that has no energy or life. Sometimes I think filmmakers just decide to throw loud noises at a viewer and hope they won't notice that nothing is going on. I'm always shocked when certain blockbusters become hits and no one seems to notice that you've got two-plus hours of pure boredom hidden as some sort of action film. The CGI monsters are just downright ugly. The CGI buildings are downright ugly. In fact, every bit of CGI here is downright ugly and look so incredibly fake that you can't ever believe anything you're seeing. The performances really aren't much better with Jackman basically sleepwalking in his role but I guess we really can't blame him since the majority of the time he was just looking at a blue screen. There's really no energy or life to be found in the film as director Stephen Sommers has the film all over the place. His story is just downright overkill and it's silly to think that with this expanded running time you could watch two films from the Golden Age of these monsters.