Release Date: May 7, 2004
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham, Shuler Hensley, Kevin J. O'Connor, Samuel West
Directed by: Stephen Sommers
Written by: Stephen Sommers
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (nonstop creature action violence and frightening images, sensuality)
Van Helsing, which is a flashy but empty monster movie from writer/director Stephen Sommers, the man who has singlehandedly revived the genre for the modern audience, could’ve used a bit of Brendan Fraser. Fraser was Sommers’s leading man in his previous two pictures, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and his cheeky, good-natured irrepressibility fit perfectly with Sommers’s authorial style -- Fraser was as overwhelmed by the movies he starred in as we, the audience, were in watching them. Instead, for this movie, Sommers has Hugh Jackman, who has never been described as cheeky or good-natured, and, perhaps consequently, neither will Van Helsing. This should’ve been the same fun, amusement ride of a movie as the Mummy films, but with a moodier star and a darker aesthetic, Sommers has only managed to unsuccessfully apply a thin veneer of solemnity over the same exuberant comic book formula.
Jackman plays the title character, Gabriel Van Helsing, who is a kind of special operations man for the Catholic Church -- he travels the world, grudgingly but capably hunting the cursed, the damned, and the occult. His latest assignment has him traveling to the Eastern European region of Transylvania to do away with the vampiric Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), who, as one would expect, has been up to no good: Dracula has contracted Dr. Viktor Frankenstein (Samuel West) to discover the key to life, so that he can produce offspring with his undead brides. This Frankenstein does, by creating his famous monster (Shuler Hensely), but things go awry, Frankenstein is killed, and Dracula is left with the late doctor’s assistant, Igor (Kevin J. O’Connor), to try to replicate the experiment.
Meanwhile, Van Helsing draws closer, aided by a Catholic friar named Carl (David Wenham), who fills roughly the same role in supplying our hero with various inventions and armaments that Q did for James Bond, and a Transylvanian gypsy, Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), who is the last surviving member of a family that has been hunting Dracula for over 400 years. In fact, the search for Dracula isn’t much of a search at all, since Van Helsing, Carl, and Anna are under attack from either the Wolf Man, whom Dracula uses as a perverse kind of guard dog, or from Dracula’s flying brides. Such monster-versus-human scenes are the movie’s bread and butter, twisting, twirling, special effects-laden jolts of adventure that serve only to stall the plot and invoke monster movies of a different kind -- the ones in which an enormous, lamentably mutated monster (say, Godzilla) came to town while the general populace swarmed haplessly about like ants on the ground below. These are, needless to say, inherently repetitive to the contemporary moviegoer, but they can be made bearable with a carefree, larger-than-life hero willing to mug for the camera and sacrifice his dignity to drop well-placed quips. Given his performance here, Jackman seems to relish that idea about as much as Van Helsing enjoys killing monsters for a living.
But a movie that is 145 minutes long can start to drag without a lead actor willing to act heroic, or at least play to the camera; Jackman’s Van Helsing is like the reclusive, modern-day pop star or pro athlete, who, having found himself in the spotlight, steadfastly refuses to accept the incumbent responsibilities. There is nothing to remember him by: no personality, no morals (or moral quandaries), no instantly memorable one-liners -- just a bunch of lethal accessories, marketable as plastic toys to the 12-year-olds his generically flip, kick-butt persona is clearly targeted at pleasing.
The supporting corps comes up short, too. Richard Roxburgh takes Count Dracula over the top -- he’s not so much scary, the way actors usually play him in other films, as he is comically demented; we never have the fear that his diabolical plan will succeed because, if Van Helsing doesn’t get him, there is the sense he’ll probably trip over his period-glamorous ponytail, or his own long-winded, villainous locution. Kate Beckinsale is reduced to an accent as Van Helsing’s fellow monster hunter, and though David Wenham provides the occasional bit of comic relief in the sidekick role, his obsequious act is a requirement for a picture like this -- the brash hero must have a timid foil of a colleague to enhance his own acts of derring-do. But in this case the chattering friar tagging along behind Van Helsing does little to engender the sort of reckless fun that should come from so boldly hunting the things that go bump in the night.
At least everything looks good. Sommers begins the movie in black and white, with a scene in which the frightened residents of Transylvania band together in an angry, torch-lit mob to string Dr. Frankenstein up on charges of grave robbing. This gives Van Helsing a touch of the classic monster pictures from which Sommers has performed a bit of grave robbery himself, and later the director shows a kind of doting fondness for great B-movies of old, the way a parent chuckles at the antics of a reckless child. In one scene, for instance, Dracula interrupts Igor, who is torturing the shackled Wolf Man: “Igor, why do you torment him so?” Igor, momentarily confused, can’t come up with a definitive answer. “It’s what I do,” he shrugs.
The locations chosen for the film also reflect the eerie, unearthly quality that many viewers will associate with Transylvania. Sommers shot the film mostly in the Czech Republic, and he never misses a chance to capture the rugged, fog-covered hills, the thick pine forests, and the gaping ravines that cut through the landscape with alarming regularity, the same kind of ethereal cinematography that made up 1999’s Sleepy Hollow. Added to this is the garish architecture of the castles, palaces, windmills, shops, and hovels that make up the towns and cities Van Helsing visits; with this setting, it would’ve been fun to see Sommers take this picture further into the realm of undiluted horror. But he did not, and the Van Helsing we’ve got is another comic book of a movie that’s more fun to look at than to watch -- which means it will go down great with teenagers who were too young to see the Mummy films at the time but will seem a little dull to everyone else.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)