SOLOMON KANE rip-off...

Rating: 3/10 (2 February 2005)

Anyone familiar with Robert E. Howard's SOLOMON KANE will recognize VAN HELSING for what it is: a rip-off, plain and simple (with emphasis on the "simple"). The prologue, which promised much, fizzled miserably much too soon and proved, unfortunately, a portent of things to come. While I must confess I thought Jackman was great in the two X-MEN movies, he seems miscast here: the director might just as well have stood a mannequin before the camera; it would've been cheaper, I'm sure-and the overall effect would've been about the same. And the awful cgi only make matters worse: the movie virtually(!) turns into a video game whenever anything remotely interesting starts to happen, with fx so cheesy that one wonders why the producers didn't simply render the entire feature thus. Why bother with live action at all if you're that gung-ho for computer graphics? TOY STORY and SHREK (among others) have confirmed the viability of cgi features. Anyone out there familiar with anime...? Or, say, Richard Corben's DEN- a series of stories that would lend themselves readily to this particular form? There's a veritable plethora of untapped material floating around that would make good cgi fodder. Dispense with the flesh-and-blood folks and get busy with some real animation, if that's what you're interested in doing...