The end of imagination

Rating: 2/10 (8 May 2004)

Designed in a boardroom, created on a computer, "Van Helsing" is the unholy progeny of a serial plagiarist and insatiable corporate greed. The result is the cinematic equivalent of a computer-generated woman: lovely to look at, but brain-dead and ultimately inhuman. Laughably unbearable when it isn't merely puerile, "Van Helsing" sees Sommers take his aping of Spielberg to new lows, while expanding his derivative grasp to squander James Whale, more of Universal's back catalogue of monsters  Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man  and the worst elements of John Williams and George Lucas. The film's monochrome opening in Transylvania pays tribute to Whales' "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935) with a frenzied, torch-lit mob armed with pitchforks and scythes surging toward Dr. Frankenstein's castle against a huge night sky. Sommers might claim he was aiming for homage but it ends up playing like a mockery  or, at best, a nod to Mel Brooks. "Van Helsing" is postmodern in the worst sense: a collage of cinematic references distorted through a high-tech lens, assembled for no other purpose than liberating money from the wallets of gullible teens. About twenty minutes in you "get it"; you realise why this film is so awful. It doesn't need to tell a story, because it isn't a film: it's an ear-flaying, mind-raping 132-minute commercial for ancillary markets  the toys, the TV show and the video game  all of which, as Universal happily admits, are ready and waiting for the greenlight if the "film" cracks the undisclosed boxoffice nut. The saddest thing is that "Van Helsing" doesn't need to be this bad. Boxoffice infernos can be stoked with quality product, e.g. "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. It just requires talent. For Sommers, handing over the writing to someone with an imagination probably would have been enough. For unlike that other doyen of event films, Jerry Bruckheimer, who has an unparalleled gift for assembling Z-grade talent, Sommers was blessed with a stellar cast and an immensely talented crew. Yet he does nothing but ritually humiliate them. And his sources. And us. It's sadly ironic that most of Sommers' literary sources sprang from minds  indeed, a whole era  which worried about the intersection of culture and unbridled technology. A century later, what has it delivered? The hairy butt-crack of a digital Mr. Hyde.