Stop it! You're hurting my ears!

Rating: 6/10 (24 May 2004)

As we might all have guessed before setting foot inside the cinema, Van Helsing very quickly and very loudly proclaims that it comes from the same director as the two recent Mummy films. Stephen Sommers appears to be entirely incapable of understanding tension, character development or indeed quiet moments of any sort, and succeeds in spending the entire film slapping on sound and visual effects in such thick layers that the audience becomes stupefied.
Aside from a few original and interesting bits - the characterisation of Frankenstein's creature and Igor, the James Bond spoofery at the beginning, the exploding mini-vampires - it's also a film that relies almost entirely on cliche. Sommers just can't help himself using tired camera angles and hackneyed script, and seems to have asked his composer to add 'atmospheric' (lazy) string music to just about every scene. He's also not averse to constantly reusing ideas once he's had them: people screaming/shouting "Van Helsing!" and people being thrown into walls appear to be among his favourites, and there are so many instances of Van Helsing's sidekick doing/saying something reluctant/cowardly, that it just stops being funny.
Sommers needs to learn a few lessons from Steven Spielberg - how to loosen up a little and let the audience become interested in the characters, and how bombarding us with surround-sound bangs and screams from beginning to end is not the best way to make an action film.