Appallingly Awful!!!

Rating: 1/10 (24 September 2010)

Let's face it... here on IMDb people only enter reviews for films they truly love or truly hate. I can't see many people logging in to write a review of a film they found mildly entertaining. Well there may be some but they probably should get out a bit more.
In the case of Van Helsing I think I can honestly say that it's the film I love to hate. I feel it's so bad that it belongs up there with Batman & Robin as a possible contender for the worst film of all time.
Where to begin....
Almost the entire failure of this mess can be attributed to Stephen Sommer the director. When he directed the Mummy he was relatively unknown so the studio kept him on a tight leash and as a result we got a well balanced kind of Indianna Jones film with horror homages. It worked well and I thought it lots of fun.
Then I saw what Stephen was capable of when you take the leash off in The Mummy Returns. Dear god what a mess. Plot goes out the window, tonnes of cheap, lazy and pointless CGI comes in and characterisation is completely ignored. Sommer had become the king of CGI for the sake of it...
The film begins in black and white as an obvious homage to the classic horror films of Dracula and Frankenstein but it quickly becomes apparent that the huge CGI budget won't be used to any decent effect when you realise that the only alteration to the actual picture is that the colour has been removed. No CGI is used to give the black and white section a grainy or authentic look. You could get the same effect just turning down the colour on your TV.
Then we meet Dracula. He's awful. A caricature of the classic horror villain rather than an actual depiction. There's no threat to him, at all. He looks like he's just turned up at your parents Halloween party in a slightly expensive outfit.
Van Helsing himself is just Hugh Jackman playing Hugh Jackman in a Van Helsing costume.
David Whenham's sidekick is rather embarrassing to watch as the Aussie actor does his best to take on a comic English accent and has a go at slapstick (which he fails at miserably by the way).
Kate Beckensale is always easy on the eyes but aside from being a woman with a need for vengeance there's very little for her to do.
After a slightly odd battle between our hero's and a bunch of flying chicks in the local village things descend into the incomprehensible.
The story jerks along between one CGI set piece and the next and takes so many ridiculous turns that you give up trying to follow it after a while. Instead you sit back and let the CGI awfulness wash over you until you decide to turn it off.
The problem is that because no time is spent on any of the characters or the story, you just don't give a toss about what's happening on screen no matter how mind-boggling a stunt the CGI is trying its best to suggest.
Bottom line this film should have been a wonderful homage to the age of the classic horror movie. Each character, good and bad, should have been lovingly represented with the care and attention they deserved.
Instead each character is shoehorned in as an excuse to show more badly rendered CGI.
There's no love here, at all. It's just vacuous action with no point to it other than to make you say "wow look at all that CGI".
If you're the sort of person who complains about a film because there's too much talking in it then this may be for you.
The rest of us need to be aware that drivel like this actually exists and needs to be avoided at all costs.