Worse than I imagined (1/2*)

Rating: 1/10 (8 June 2004)

"Van Helsing" could very well be the funniest movie of 2004. The only problem is that the parts that are SUPPOSED to be funny aren't funny at all, and all the parts that AREN'T supposed to be funny are hysterical. This is one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen, and not in a good way.
Hugh Jackman plays the famous titular character (who I don't believe was ever envisioned as a swarthy superhero, but oh well), who is sort of like the James Bond of whatever century this is set in (I didn't care enough to notice). He has gadgets, works for the Catholic church, and goes around killing monsters.
While the original character of Van Helsing was only after Dracula, this Van Helsing also fights Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, and in the first horribly bad scene in the movie, Mr. Hyde (who is shown here as a sort of ultra fake-looking giant pudgy caveman).
There are simply too many idiotic parts in this movie that I couldn't possibly recite them all. There's Kate Beckinsale's ludicrous "gypsy" accent ("Ze Frankenstein monsta!"), Richard Roxburgh (who was great in "Moulin Rouge") playing one of the worst Draculas in movie history, the terrible "brides of Dracula" (one of them taunts Van Helsing with the devastating grade school put-down "Too bad. So sad!"), the dopey comic relief, the complete over-use of (badly done) CGI... I could go on and on. And I haven't even mentioned Jackman bounding around in a loincloth, or the "funny sidekick" played by David Wenham who I was dearly hoping would get killed.
On the plus side, there are some pretty nice sights here and there, of mountains and castles and such. All completely fake of course.
Some movies can be dumb in a smart way (like the "Charlie's Angels" movies), or at least dumb in an entertaining way. "Van Helsing", though it certainly has enough unintentional laugh-out-loud moments to make it slightly bearable, is so dumb and so long (almost 2 1/2 hours!) that it ends up draining the energy from you instead of giving you a surreal good time, like the best "bad" movies can do.
Combining all the classic monsters into one film is a nice idea, but it was already done in 1987, in "The Monster Squad", one of my favorite horror movies as a kid. That movie was much scarier than this piece of crap, and was INTENTIONALLY funny. So rent that instead.