Dracula sucks...and so does this movie.

Rating: 1/10 (26 June 2005)

It's taken a year to come to terms with my feelings on Van Helsing...I didn't want to be another face in the sea of people who came out hating this movie. And hate it I did, but it's gone beyond just mere distaste. I've carried the seed of loathing for it in my heart, and that seed has borne a bitter fruit. No longer can I burden myself under the diseased weight of Van Helsing, I must vent my bile and share.
Mercifully, parts of it have faded, or failed to encode themselves in the first place upon my memory. I have no recollection of a soundtrack for example, which doesn't say much for it. I think I'll attack things in a more or less chronological order, and trust you'll forgive me any errors in my recounting, chalking them up to my mind's natural attempts to protect me from any longterm effects of viewing "the movie".
So we start off with a black and white introduction, no doubt an homage to the Universal Horror Movies Van Helsing draws much inspiration from. How much easier to use B&W to do this, than say...i dunno actual setting and atmosphere, or talented direction and performances. From the moment of his appearance, Richard Roxburgh is a gangrenous arrow lodged in my heart. His interpretation of Dracula as effete twit does more damage to the count than all of Vlad Tepes's crimes combined. From the way he's filmed, you assume the director thinks he's some kind of great performer, someone that deserves to have the camera on him constantly. This is simply not the case. A retarded orangutan with a sledgehammer in a Faberge egg shop has more subtlety and dignity than Roxburgh will ever be capable of. He doesn't even have an interesting face, a feature many other actors can use as a tool to heighten their performance. All Roxburgh has is Thompson Twin hair and incriminating pictures of Steven Sommers apparently.
We then cut to Paris where our hero Van Helsing is trying to kill Shrek. Or Mr. Hyde, it doesn't really matter. He certainly owes a lot to Indiana Jones and Vampire Hunter D (a Japanese cartoon featuring vampires, werewolves, and wide brimmed hat wearing, long haired mystery man which is incidentally also a much better movie for people who want this kind of monster mash entertainment done well) a source i'm sure the costume designers, etc. were well familiar with. I'll take an aside her to mention that I don't really fault Hugh Jackman with anything in this movie, and i'm sure the wheelbarrow of cash they dumped in his lap was hard to turn his nose up to. I only hope Hugh takes more care with roles in his future.
VH is sent to Transylvania to aid the Valerius family who have been ineffectually fighting monsters for generations. This raises the question...how long can a family ineffectually fight monsters before they're just a large grouping of the same last name on a buncha headstones? We're witness to their incompetence when we see that their tactics for hunting werewolves involves only one guy being given a silver bullet, and arming the rest of the hunting party with regular firearms. Also, the Valerius family can't seem to remember which accent they're supposed to be using. None more guilty of this than cinematic albatross, Kate Beckinsale as Anna. She goes from Transylvanian, to British, to British trying to sound American, and at one point Natasha from Bullwinkle, which I found odd. She may be easy on the eyes, but with Van Helsing completing the trifecta of Pearl Harbor and Underworld, If I see her name on the cast list, it's nature's way of warning you that there's gonna be some bad movie ahead.
So Drac's masterplan involves inflicting his bride's shorties on the world. But Movie, you say, don't vampires make other vampires by biting people? Isn't there a whole village of inbred idiots protected by ineffectual monster hunters ripe for the taking? No, we want cgi gremlin knockoffs. Oh, OK, I'll just lie back down and you can continue to kick my groin then, OK?Now, somehow, Frankenstein and the Wolfman tie into making the winged monkey's plan work, but for the life of me, I can't remember how, the hallmark of a really great script. There's so many plot holes pointing them all out may take up more space than IMDb is prepared to provide, so I'll just hit the highlights, some spoilers may follow, but nothing I say is gonna spoil this movie any more than the filmmaker's themselves have. During the carriage chase down winding roads, our fearless heroes fool the flying vampires by having a duplicate carriage on a side road....which should have been plainly visible to any airborne undead. If the wolf man is the only thing that can kill Dracula, why the hell does he keep them around? And it sure would seem that having the antidote handy would be a pretty effective means of negating the threat any potential wolf man assassins might present, but he keeps the tiny vial in a giant room of his goofy wire shrouded tower. Finally, Anna can have the crap kicked out of her by various monsters throughout the movie, even getting dropped five stories by a flying vampire onto a stone floor with a minimum of discomfort, but all it takes is VH to shove her onto a velvet couch while he's wolfed out to kill her.
Van Helsing continues the tradition of incredibly stupid movies with a CGI comb-over that completely fails to distract from the glaring flaws inherent within, the tradition started with such movies as Dragonheart, the Lost World, Armageddon, etc. In addition, it's the second part of a career suicide note that Steven Sommer's started with the Mummy Returns, a vile movie that was without equal until Van Helsing came along. And there, is the only category where it excels.