Maybe We Should Get Hugh Jackman to Track Down Bin Laden

Rating: 4/10 (7 May 2004)

What a waste. What a shame.
Kate Beckinsale, please retire. Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.
The only thing worse than than a boring action movie, is sitting next to a group of restless teenagers watching a boring action movie. Sure, it's no one in particular's fault that the teens were expecting every minute of this film to be as action-packed as the Burly Brawl, but that is of little consequence to you while you witness them grumbling and fumbling with their illuminated cell phones in your peripheral vision. Fun times.
The action this film does contain is...rudimentary and yet overdone at the same time. Each action scene goes on for what seems like ten minutes. This is not a big problem except that at about the 90-second mark all the action seemed to be repeating itself. At one point one of our heroes spits out a sentiment to a bad guy that I first heard more than two decades ago in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY and have heard repeated in a half dozen films since (including DIE HARD): "If you are going to kill someone, kill them. Don't talk." Agreed. Every bad guy in VAN HELSING should have learned that lesson years before this film took place. Instead we're treated with scene after scene of villains slowly stalking our heroes while delivering menacing monologues so lengthy they would have left Rush Limbaugh breathless.
The plot is thin, even with everything the screenwriter tried to cram into it: there's every movie monster of the 20th century except Hannibal Lecter and Godzilla, a romance that condenses out of nothingness, a centuries-old feud, the secret crime-fighting society (complete with hidden HQ and James Bond's Q-like inventors), Dracula's horde of winged babies, the no-nonsense hero with trusty comical sidekick, the beautiful heroine who always needs saving, a duplicitous gravedigger ("It's what I do"), a monster-with-a-heart-of-gold, a quartet of bumbling evil henchmen. If you watch carefully in the second half of the film you will see the kitchen sink.
Hugh Jackman showed flashes of greatness in the X-men films. Here he is mostly flat. The aforementioned Beckinsale is atrocious. Between the horrible accent she affects and the historically inaccurate Madonna-esque pseudo-S&M corseted catsuit, she is about as believable in her role as Roseanne Barr would be (I thought women of that era were supposed to be chunkier anyway). The rest of the actors were decent enough spewing out their rote lines.
Go see VAN HELSING. Or else you won't know what's going on in the sequel.