It Ain't Just the Vampires That Suck...

Rating: Null/10 (9 May 2004)

Van Helsing is not a great movie, I'm afraid. It's not even a good one. It's vaguely significant in that it's the first time since "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" came out (that'd be in 1948) that Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman have appeared in the same film. Too bad it was this one.
Hugh Jackman (who was a lot more entertaining as Wolverine in the X-Men movies) stumbles and lurches through this mish-mash of well-meaning special effects sequences to no clear end. The story is muddy--it seems as if they must have had more script than film, and had to do the best they could with the resources available--and where it seems to proceed along some sort of coherent line, which it does for moments at a time, the directions it takes leave you scratching your head.
Jackman is Gabriel Van Helsing, apparently no particular relation to the Abraham of Dracula fame, who gets sent hither and yon by some secret gang within the Roman Catholic Church (a concept which makes its appearance in a single scene and then vanishes, never to be heard from again--there's a lot of that sort of thing in this film) to retrieve or kill various supernatural baddies. Presumably as a result of these activities, Van Helsing is himself a wanted man, a fact made clear in the opening sequence of the movie and, likewise, never referred to for the entirety of the remainder of the picture.
In an early sequence, he does battle with Mr. Hyde (who comes off a little, but not a lot, better than he did in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a film which seems to have presaged many of the flaws of Van Helsing) and then gets sent off to Transylvania to deal with Dracula himself, who's planning (I think) to take over the world with thousands of bat-like "offspring". The little batlings are lying dormant in globby cocoons reminiscent of the wad of goo that Natasha Henstridge burst out of in Species, but aren't quite alive, or undead, or something: they need to be zapped with electricity run through Frankenstein's monster--juicing 'em through a werewolf is suboptimal--in order to enable them to flap around without their exploding into gobbets of green goo, a fact which has Dracula's three wives extremely depressed.
In an early sequence that's probably as good as this movie gets, Van Helsing dispatches one of the harpy-like wives with a Gatling crossbow provided by his assistant, the Friar ("I'm not actually a monk...") Carl, who acts more-or-less as Q to Van Helsing's James Bond. The special effects here are okay, but as CGI-heavy as any of Sommers' previous films. And like The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, the production values overall are quite good--sets, costumes, make-up are all great. Not put to any especially worthwhile use, but good eye-candy, for the most part.
Speaking of eye-candy, Kate Beckinsale plays the local princess whose family has sworn to destroy the vampire, and who apparently devote themselves to werewolf-baiting in the meantime.
If all of this sounds disjointed and silly, it's only because it is. The script is a knot of non-sequiturs, dead-ends and pointless excursions, and Sommers--who has a pretty good eye, but not much of a sense of what makes sense, it seems--does, I suppose, the best he can with it. He'd be in a decent position to blame this morass on the writer, except for one thing: he is the writer.
Do I sound disappointed? Well, I got to see a couple of good trailers.
Of course, that's what I said about this one. If you've been wanting to see this, see The Mummy instead: it's funnier, tighter and better directed by a big margin. Wait for this to come out on DVD. Then wait some more.