equal parts exciting and absurd

Rating: 7/10 (16 April 2005)

I love director Stephen Sommers because of his apparent love for 40s B-movie thrillers, and perhaps that's why other people don't like him. It seems that a bad action movie with a modern sensibility like Spider-Man is always better received than a fun, distinctly old-fashioned picture like The Mummy. I don't know what to make of it.
Like The Mummy, Van Helsing got more bad reviews than it deserved, although admittedly it does have problems. The movie is best at the very beginning in a black and white sequence evoking the old Frankenstein/Dracula movies of the 40s while tossing in 21st century special effects. This is classic Sommers. It then changes to color, for no discernible reason except you can't make a whole movie in black and white in 2004.
Action scenes are incredibly exciting. The movie is big and fast and monster transformations happen with a tremendous speed that makes them at times startling. Hugh Jackman is great and Kate Beckinsale is gorgeous.
But while Van Helsing is exciting, it fails miserably at being scary. This is the movie's weak point. The vampire's hover between scary and camp, not quite landing at either point. So what should be eerie or terrifying just comes across as silly. It feels as though Sommers realized he couldn't get scary and so played some scenes for laughs, but he couldn't give up the idea of making things scary so he kept trying, basically fighting against himself.
One also has pretty much no feeling for the characters. This is perhaps the main difference between Van Helsing and those old horror movies, which mixed a sense of tragedy and loss into the thrills. But for all its flaws, the movie has that roller-coaster thrill ride sensibility that keeps a smile on your face.