As Dracula puts it: "I have no heart!" SPOILERS!!!

Rating: Null/10 (10 October 2004)

I guess most things about this film already have been said, but... holy crap, it was so bad.
Stephen Sommers' films just get worse and worse. They're all more or less bad, but for each film he's cranked up the stupid level a notch. Van Helsing is so devoid of plot and characterisation - and filled with cheesy CGI and dumb, dumb, dumb action scenes - that it will give you a headache.
Sommers obviously feels like a kid in a candy store when he can pick and choose from old monster films and make his own version of them. But why cannot anyone at least stop him from writing scripts? Try to convince him, bribe him, lock him up and throw away the key - but don't give him millions of dollars and complete control ever again! He may love these monsters, but he is torturing them (and the audience). He wants to be like Frankenstein and bring life to the monsters, but he is just one of the villagers trying to burn down the castle.
What's missing in Van Helsing is heart. Underneath the heavily animated, glossy surface, Van Helsing is as dead as Dracula. Do we get to know these characters? No. They're just puppets, controlled by Sommers, but ultimately still only inanimate objects, lost among computer animated sets and sceneries. They lack purpose, other than to stumble along into another fight, another plunge down an abyss, another pointless discussion. All accompanied by thunderstorms and heavy rain.
Sommers should be told that less IS more - as Hyde, Frankenstein, werewolves, vampires, and hapless heroes swing from yet another rope, chain, cable, or whatever is closest at hand. Everything that happens doesn't happen for a reason, other than that it leads to more maniacal mayhem. There is no logic to anything (Dracula can only be killed by a werewolf, so naturally he often uses them for his dirty work, but keeps the precious anti-dote in a container filled with acid inside a room - opened and locked from the outside - in his castle, which is accessed via a map, that's really a mirror, that's really a portal to another world).
When did actors suddenly become such a nuisance, that it's better to have them replaced by goofy looking cartoons every time they have to perform a more challenging task than uttering a line in a dodgy accent? Why must film studios defend bad films by saying that they're just supposed to be distracting fun, as if that would be an excuse for the lack of any quality whatsoever? How long will the audience put up with over-priced, over-hyped, and over-everything films?
Van Helsing isn't alive. It is very dead. Very dead. [0/10]