It's not so much that it's a bad movie...there's just too bloody much of it.

Rating: 6/10 (1 February 2006)

I looked up the entry for "Too much of a good thing" in Wikipedia, and there was a promotional poster for "Van Helsing" in the second tag.
OK, not really. But after seeing the hammering this movie took from the critics, I had to "see this marvel with mine own eyes!" (to quote Earthworm Jim) in order to see what could spark such enmity. And after sitting through 2 1/2 hours or more of roller-coaster plotting, thundering sound design, apocalyptic orchestral riffs and zillions of dollars worth of special effects and CGI, I had to say...that it's not so much that the movie is bad, as that exhausts the viewers' patience after an hour or so.
The best metaphor I can come up with is to compare the movie to eating 3 boxes of "Captain Crunch" at one sitting. Now, "Captain Crunch" was one of my favorite breakfast cereals as a callow youth, and in fact I still like it immensely as an occasional treat. It is the very essence of the "frosted sugar bomb" that kids love. And "Van Helsing" is both vivid and crisp and shallow and delicious and cloying the way that a good 99% sugar breakfast food should be. But "Captain Crunch" gets old fast if you have to eat it past your normal satiation point...and so does "Van Helsing." I loved the costumes and the character designs, and I thought the cast did a great job with the overwrought, overheated, overstuffed screenplay and I thought that maybe 70% of the CGI effects were reasonably convincing, and there were some very nice touches here and there that added a lot of punch to the movie (Sommers has been good at this kind of stuff ever since his remake of "The Mummy")...but after about 90 minutes, I just wanted it to be over, while the movie still had an hour to go.
The solution, of course, is to stop the DVD player every 30 minutes or so and get up, walk around, run an errand or two, then get back to the movie after 5-10 minutes and have at it again. THEN "Van Helsing" becomes something you can enjoy. (This is similar to my experience with the first "Star Trek" movie and "Barry Lyndon" and "Altered States".) So yes, if you are a big fan of the old Universal monsters and you have some patience and you enjoy an approach that throws EVERYTHING Sommers can think of into the mix with a plot that jumps around like a bag full of angry ferrets, you'll probably get a bang out of "Van Helsing". Otherwise, just avoid it...it will probably irritate and exasperate you.