Good Looking But Tired Retread of Monster Legends

Rating: 4/10 (19 December 2005)

"Van Helsing" has excellent production design, music, sound editing, and special effects that should rattle the pre-teens it is aimed at and would probably have given me nightmares at that age but these days it's just rated PG-13.
Both Kate Beckinsale and Hugh Jackman manage to do blue-screen acting within clunky costumes, but it's Richard Roxburgh's Count Dracula who really stands out as sexily sinister. One could certainly imagine his prolific fertility with his three model-pretty brides. Australia just keeps putting out these hunks who can do any accent.
The sidekick is the silliest yet for such movies; even the ones in "Lara Croft" are more interesting.
What a shame that Stephen Sommers wrote and directed as I just kept thinking what Joss Whedon would have done with the material instead of this literal and visual recycling of the old Frankenstein and Wolfman movies, etc., that were tired by the time Abbott and Costello satirized them.
What was that about Van Helsing having been at Masada? That must have been in the days when his name was Abraham, before this movie for no particular reason changed it to Gabriel.
(originally written 5/28/2004)