CinemaBlend
The movie is assembled like a patchwork quilt, with various elements from monster legend pieced together and dropped in the small village of Transylvania. It’s there that monster hunter Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is sent by the church to stop the dastardly plots of Dracula and his luscious vampire brides. It’s all driven by Dracula’s desperate need to procreate, a desire which makes a lot of sense when you see his three lovely wives. To do so, he needs to discover the secret of Frankenstein’s monster, life from lifelessness is the key. Because of course, since vampires are technically dead they cannot give birth to live progeny.
Van Helsing himself has seen nearly as many incarnations as Dracula, but this time he’s not just hunting vampires and he’s undergone a slight name change. Instead he’s a tool of the Church, their go-to guy, a medieval version of James Bond complete with requisite gadget man played David Wenham, going against his Lord of the Rings leading man type to play a mousey friar named Carl.
After a brilliant black and white opening, in which the Universal logo dissolves in flame and villagers hunt down Frankenstein with burning torches, we switch to Van Helsing on assignment in London. There he tracks down Mr. Hyde, whom he is supposed to capture. Of course things don’t quite go to plan, so Van Helsing is whisked back to the Vatican where he’s assigned to Transylvania and the evil plots of Count Dracula.
There, after narrowly avoiding the same mob that did Frankenstein in, he meets a gorgeous gypsy princess named Anna (Kate Beckinsale), who represents the last in nine generations of family sworn to defeat and kill Count Dracula. If she fails, then none of her family will ever make it out of purgatory. Time is running out and Dracula’s tasty brides are after her blood. Anna’s suspicion eventually turns to trust and the two team up to eliminate the Count. Conveniently, should the dark lord fall, so will all of his vampire creations.
Van Helsing is a movie in love with monsters and in love with the movie-going experience. For Sommers this project is a gigantic “what if” that throws all the characters he loved as a kid into one big mix, just to see who comes out on top. Because of that, everything is bigger in Van Helsing, Sommers is never content to settle for subtlety. When Dracula goes to bite into someone, he doesn’t just pop out a pair of fangs and bite a neck. His entire face distends to reveal row after row of vicious, blood sucking teeth. Frankenstein isn’t just a big lumbering brute; he’s powered by bursts of electricity, with glowing baubles all over his body to keep him trudging along. His face isn’t just a cobbled together mess; it’s poorly connected and tends to come loose with just a smack. Characters never just run down a hallway… why run when they can swing? Sommers never settles for simple segue or basic templates. Van Helsing is all about delivering MORE in a way that works here, but so often falls flat in less capable hands.
Like Sommers previous two films (The Mummy and The Mummy Returns), Van Helsing is a CGI-driven experience. Done poorly, computer effects get pretty boring and over-reliance on them takes all the weight out of exciting action sequences. Yet, used properly they can create visual magic and Sommers capably does that here. All the effects aren’t perfect and maybe I’d have rather seen a couple of guys in prosthetic monster suits duking it out than sitting through the not quite believable CGI-Dracula versus CGI-Wolfman fight. But overall, Van Helsing’seffects work in a resounding and entertaining way. They operate best in generating stunning scenery, like a beautifully detailed ball in Budapest or the dingy world of Castle Frankenstein.
The plot moves fast and the movie is loud and breakneck paced. It’s probably true that some of Sommers’ screenplay may not even quite make sense. But what makes it to the screen is a wonderfully wild summer movie that’s restrained itself just enough to avoid becoming another special f/x overkill. Sommers has turned out a capably assembled picture that delivers all the fun you could wish for in a modern monster flick.
Roger&Ebert
Strange that a movie so eager to entertain would forget to play "Monster Mash" over the end credits. There have been countless movies uniting two monsters ("Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man," "King Kong vs. Godzilla," etc.), but "Van Helsing" convenes Frankenstein, his Monster, Count Dracula, the Wolf Man, Igor, Van Helsing the vampire hunter, assorted other werewolves, werebats and vampires, and even Mr. Hyde, who as a bonus seems to think he is the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The movie is like a Greatest Hits compilation; it's assembled like Frankenstein's Monster, from spare parts stitched together and brought to life with electricity, plus lots of computer-generated images. The plot depends on Dracula's desperate need to discover the secret of Frankenstein's Monster, because he can use it to bring his countless offspring to life. Because Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) and his vampire brides are all dead, they cannot give birth, of course, to live children.
That they give birth at all is somewhat remarkable, although perhaps the process is unorthodox, since his dead offspring hang from a subterranean ceiling wrapped in cocoons that made me think, for some reason, of bagworms, which I spent many a summer hand-picking off the evergreens under the enthusiastic direction of my father.
Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman, Wolverine in the "X-Men" movies) is sometimes portrayed as young, sometimes old in the Dracula movies. Here he's a professional monster-killer with a Phantom of the Opera hat, who picks up a dedicated friar named Carl (David Wenham) as his sidekick. His first assignment is to track down Mr. Hyde (Robbie Coltrane), who now lives in the Notre Dame cathedral and ventures out for murder. That job does not end as planned, so Van Helsing then moves on to the Vatican City to get instructions and and be supplied with high-tech weapons by the ecclesiastical equivalent of James Bond's Q.
Next stop: Transylvania, where the movie opened with a virtuoso b&w sequence showing a local mob waving pitchforks and torches and hounding Frankenstein's Monster into a windmill, which is set ablaze. We know, having seen the old movies, that the Monster will survive, but the mob has worked itself into such a frenzy that when Van Helsing and Carl arrive in the village, they are almost forked and burnt just on general principles. What saves them is an attack by three flying vampiresses, who like to scoop up their victims and fly off to savor their blood; Van Helsing fights them using a device that fires arrows like a machinegun.
And that leads to his meeting the beautiful Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), who with her brother Velkan (Will Kemp) represents the last of nine generations of a family who will never find eternal rest until it vanquishes Dracula. (Conveniently, if you kill Dracula, all the vampires he created will also die.) Anna is at first suspicious of Van Helsing, but soon they are partners in vengeance, and the rest of the plot (there is a whole lot of it) I will leave you to discover for yourselves.
The director, Stephen Sommers, began his career sedately, directing a very nice "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1993) and the entertaining "Jungle Book" (1994). Then Victor Frankenstein must have strapped him to the gurney and turned on the juice, because he made a U-turn into thrillers, with "Deep Rising" (1998), where a giant squid attacks a cruise ship, and "The Mummy" (1999) and "The Mummy Returns" (2001, introducing The Rock as The Scorpion King). Now comes "Van Helsing," which employs the ultimate resources of CGI to create a world that is violent and hectic, bizarre and entertaining, and sometimes very beautiful.
CGI can get a little boring when it allows characters to fall hundreds of feet and somehow survive, or when they swoop at the ends of ropes as well as Spider-Man, but without Spidey's superpowers. But they can also be used to create a visual feast, and here the cinematography byAllen Daviau ("E.T.") and the production design by Allen Cameron join with Sommers' imagination for spectacular sights. The best is a masked ball in Budapest, which is part real (the musicians balancing on balls, the waiters circling on unicycles) and part fabricated in the computer. Whatever. It's a remarkable scene, and will reward study on the DVD. So will the extraordinary coach chase.
I also liked the movie's recreation of Victor Frankenstein's laboratory, which has been a favorite of production designers, art directors and set decorators since time immemorial (Mel Books' "Young Frankenstein" recycled the actual sets built for James Whale's "The Bride of Frankenstein"). Here Frankenstein lives in a towering gothic castle, just down the road from Dracula, and the mechanism lifts the Monsters to unimaginable heights to expose him to lightning bolts. There are also plentiful crypts, stygian passages, etc., and a library in which a painting revolves, perhaps in tribute to Brooks' revolving bookcase.
The screenplay by Sommers has humor but restrains itself; the best touches are the quiet ones, as when the friar objects to accompanying Van Helsing ("But I'm not a field man," he insists) and when the Monster somewhat unexpectedly recites the 23rd Psalm.
At the outset, we may fear Sommers is simply going for f/x overkill, but by the end, he has somehow succeeded in assembling all his monsters and plot threads into a high-voltage climax. "Van Helsing" is silly and spectacular, and fun.
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