A truly bad movie

Rating: 1/10 (5 March 2012)

I don't think this movie was underrated or under-appreciated in any way...In fact, I think that this movie deserves way more criticism and more bad reviews. Personally, I don't think that were anything remotely funny or interesting about this movie: It is true that the plot seem like something borrowed from a cheap, "B" movie, but, unlike those cheap flicks, "Van Helsing" feels terribly forced, dull, and, the worst of it is that is incredibly boring.
Yes, it is boring. The plot is filled with all the elements from summer blockbusters and also it is so incredibly over the top that somebody could expect this to be entertaining, at least. Sadly, instead of that, "Van Helsing" feels just idiotic and endless, with unfunny jokes, unmotivated action scenes, a plot that goes nowhere, flat characters that are very hard to relate. Honestly, I don't what Stephen Sommers was trying to do with this movie: If this was supposed to be an homage to all the classic monster histories, it just fails, mostly because of the immense amount of "liberties" that he took about the whole mythology that exists around all the characters that appear in this movie. Most of those change seem gratuitous, or just made in order to make everything "cooler" for the modern audience. (I think that could be done without reaching this level of ridiculousness, that put this on the same level of other cinematic disasters, such as "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" from Stephen Norrington, or "The Brothers Grimm" from Terry Gilliam) Avoid it.
I think that "Van Helsing" was the first vampire movie to be this bad. Then, "Twilight" appeared, but that's another story.