Bleghhh...

Rating: 3/10 (21 June 2019)

Hugh Jackman spends his time running around, dodging sword slashes and vampire bites in slow motion, jumping over broken bridges and jumping from death-defying heights with his trench cloak rippling in the wind behind him. They turned Van Helsing into a character that fights like Neo from "The Matrix", but has no personality whatsoever. They reduce great literary villains and characters to poorly choreographed fifteen-minute action set pieces that take place in horribly busy, overcrowded frames. The characters never do anything remarkably interesting as far as how they fight either. Van Helsing is pretty much the Vatican's monster hunter version of James Bond; he's got ridiculous gadgets and weapons, but he never does anything cool with them. Instead, Jackman hits a monster and the monster hits back, over and over again until one of them dies. There's no tension, there are rarely any stakes established- the dialogue in between the action scene is heavily expositional and often incredibly stilted. Every scene just feels like an excuse to move us to the next action sequence; there's no thought into why things look the way they do, other than if something looks cool. For our full review of Van Helsing visit True Myth Media!