Wolverine, the Vampire Slayer

Rating: 3/10 (24 May 2004)

Well, it was yet another Sunday afternoon and I had just watched the Breakfast Club, so I was in the mood for the movies and some good acting. Thus I decided to try out the new Hugh Jackman-movie, Van Helsing. Good. I hadn't much expectation anyway, believing that it would be yet another nicely done action film similar to the Mummy. Unfortunately, I was mistaken. I don't know when it hit me (probably when the heroine in the high heels opened her mouth to speak in that weird, completely unnecessary accent), but suddenly I knew that this would be a film focusing on the impact of the special effects rather than the plot outline. I wasn't exactly expecting Shakespeare, anyway, but there were some things that made an "old" movie buff like me cringe: -There were hints at some deeper involvement between Dracula and Van Helsing, as well as his role in the ancient history of Transylvania , but somehow, all was badly explained. -There is no way one can understand why Van Helsing was, like, 400 years old, being human. He was human, wasn't he? -If the people in Transylvania were speaking their own language, why did they bother putting on that preposterous accent anyway?
-Why didn't Van Helsing have that accent(from what I know, he was German anyway), if he lived there 400 years ago? What did he do in the meantime? How did Anna know about him? Was she speaking English? -Did anyone else notice how often the heroine was hurled against rocks, spun around, beaten up and God knows what else without breaking so much as a fingernail? And in the end, Van Helsing throws her on the couch and she just dies out of no apparent reason. It struck me funny and I wonder who thought of that lame ending for her after she'd proved to be unbreakable.
Last but not least, the main character curiously reminded me of X-Men's Wolverine: his charming, innate grumpiness, his quest for recovering his memories, yadda-yadda-yadda. I can't imagine I was the only one who noticed that. All in all, Van Helsing is a movie packed (over packed) with action, wonderful special effects (which are becoming tiresome, to say the least), a hilarious, sneering villain and a great sidekick... but absolutely no story. It is cliché after cliché and appallingly shallow. Nice for a Sunday afternoon, but I wouldn't watch it again... ever.