Monster mess

Rating: 4/10 (13 October 2004)

The teaser footage for this Universal monster mash looked so promising you can only wonder how director Stephen Sommers dropped the brain so badly after his earlier successful transplant of new life into The Mummy.
Reuniting the staple horror film icons of Dracula, the Frankenstein monster and a wolfman a la House Of Dracula/House Of Frankenstein looked to be a sure-fire formula for 90 minutes of nostalgic, goofy fun but somewhere along the line it went the way of Baron Victor's lumbering creation and rose from its gurney a half-finished, bloated patchwork of iconic moments from other, better, movies.
The opening is a bravura homage/resurrection of the 1931 Frankenstein's climactic windmill immolation, shot in gloriously textured monochrome, but it's a potential which soon falters as clandestine Vatican monster-hunter Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) catches up to an outsized Edward Hyde on top of Notre Dame in a direct steal from Alan Moore's The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Thereafter, he's swiftly teamed up with a Q-like monk (David Wenham), gypsy princess Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale, emoting like a bodice-clad wardrobe and spouting the most hilarious eastern European accent since Star Trek's Chekov) and an arsenal of improbable weaponry (automatic crossbow, anyone?) and is sent to Transylvania to foil a scheme by Count Dracula (a staggeringly hammy Richard Roxburgh) and his three brides to steal the Frankenstein monster's energy to hatch out their offspring. Oh, and a wolfman pops up a lot.
Given the beautiful Gothic fairytale look of the film, it's overburdened at every turn by some unforgivably ropey computer animation until it looks as if Sommers is just hurling expensive spectacle at the screen for its own sake (a coach and horses leaping a yawning 50ft chasm, for crying out loud).
Jackman's a fine heroic lead but, like all these characters, is sketched in as a two-dimensional thumbnail with nothing to do but trudge grimly on until wooden stakes and the end credits save us all.