Cheese Incarnate, gone bad

Rating: 4/10 (11 April 2005)

Cheese Incarnate, "gone bad" describes Van Helsing to a tee. It's loud, it's full of explosions and cartoonish special effects, silly lines (especially from The Brides of Dracula), goofy humor, and Saturday morning villains. And this would be fine. Sommers did the exact same things with both of The Mummy films, and I was pleased as peach about it. Unfortunately that's not what Sommers did with Van Helsing. Sommers attempted to make a movie that was dark along with action-packed. And unfortunately, to make something dark it has to have two things: atmosphere to match and drama. I wasn't feeling the atmosphere, and the drama pushed the film past camp into irritation. To put it simply, the film was overacted in its attempt to be dark. There was one scene in particular where Dracula was having an argument (or conversation; I really couldn't tell the implied mood of the scene) with his wives, and I had no idea what was going on. There wasn't a point to the conversation, as it merely hopped from one subject to another, and it didn't help move the plot along at all. The scene was overacted in some vague attempt to stick feelings in a film otherwise devoid of it, and several other scenes mimicked this same type of structure (especially at the end). There was theme in there about not reading a book by it's cover (or something to that effect: it wasn't really hashed out until the last 30 minutes of the film), but by the end your just fed up with the overdrive into hokey mock-drama that you really don't care. If Van Helsing could have kept the pace and feeling it had in the first battle with Mr. Hyde, then it would've been fine. It didn't. Van Helsing reached to high, and never even got within arm length of it's goals.