Watchable but ultimately under-whelming fantasy adventure

Rating: Null/10 (3 June 2004)

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs
Those who can cast their minds back to Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Bram Stoker's horror masterpiece Dracula will remember the titular VH as a ragged,dishevelled old fella played by Anthony Hopkins.Here,he's played by the not quite so convincing but more relatably youthful Hugh Jackman.
Here,his mission is to travel to Transylvania and assist in the extermination of Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) so that the family of Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale) may finally see the gates of Heaven.
In it's favour,director Stephen Sommers's film certainly has an interesting,well conceived concept on his hands,not unlike that of last year's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,which I have yet to see.It just doesn't manage to execute it quite as well as it could have.A big part of the problem is really with the script.When it works,it can be fairly engaging and even rather enthralling.When it fails,it is laughably bad,with cast members made to roll off lines of embarrassingly terrible,botched dialogue in as wooden a manner as possible.It blows hot and blows cold as it does,and as such makes the whole story one that doesn't manage to totally engage you throughout.
On the cast front,in the lead role,Jackman is fairly bland and unaffecting,just about competent enough but just not quite giving the role that edge it so badly needed to be brilliant.Beckinsale is voluptuous and has positive sex appeal as the heroine.And Shuler Hensley has an inadvertently appealing role as Frankenstein's monster,managing to illicit a quiet,bumbling sympathy that is quite a pleasant highlight indeed.But then there's Roxburgh's Dracula,who just has this sort of off-putting comic feel to him that really effects the flow of the thing.He fails to be really menacing in any way,like a lighter version of Billy Drago out of Delta Force 2.And that ain't good.
The movie also benefits from some genuinely rather effective jump scenes and some quite impressive action sequences here and there (it would be a summer blockbuster,after all).But on the whole,very watchable though it is,it is never as much fun or as exploitative of it's opportunities as it could have been.It's not particularly bad and not particularly good.And considering what it could have been,ladies and gentlemen,that is what I call one wasted opportunity.***