Not so serious monster smash

Rating: 5/10 (12 July 2004)

Movies like Blade and underworld opened the doors of vampires and werewolves to the big audience once again. Of course this means that there are vultures who want their share of the tasty and rich corpse. This could be a good thing, but in this case it's not. For example comparing Van Helsing to Blade the difference is that Blade is a good movie and comparing to the Underworld difference is that Underworld has credible filming. Sorry Van Helsing
Movie is about this radical monster hunter called Van Helsing. Actor Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing is just walking through the movie with basic routine. Nothing special is transferred to the screen. I miss the Wolverine attitude what Hugh gave in X-Men.
Movie's worst problem (after that annoying idiot sidekick who is forced to tag alone with Mr. Helsing) is that it tries too much to please everybody. Movie is bit of comedy, action, fantasy, `romance?' and horror. Combining all these factors make the movie only to be below average in every category. It can't be a good action film because it's too busy trying to be scary and so on.. Well the makers of the film have really wanted to invest their multi category story by giving the film over two hours duration. It's pretty rare to have such a long time in this kind of movie but it won't work. Movie is over long and after the first hour it starts repeating itself pretty much and starts to make you pretty bored and numb.
If you have to find something good out of the film I have to give a credit of the huge amount of effects they have use. In over two hour film there is not many scenes where CGI graphics aren't used. This is a good thing because so many times effect movies have effects only couple of minutes (the scenes what you see in trailer) and that's that. Rest of the movie is just dull conversation etc. But that's a difference in Van Helsing. Unfortunately the effects used in movie are only in average level, some are almost good and some are bad. But if you like watching effects there's plenty of that in this film.
At the end just to keep the movie review in balance and remind that we are talking about a bad movie here, I have to say that the gadgets and guns Helsing were using are too over sci-fi to be only cool or funny, they were embarrassing. Keep away from this one and eat some garlic just to make sure that it keeps away from you.