re:mote voices

Title: Van Helsing
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham, Shuler Hensley
Director: Stephen Sommers

In terms of main stream block buster potential it should not be that hard to make a film containing Mr. Hyde, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, and Count Dracula work and work well. But then in age where increasingly it is more about special effects, where the one liner makes dialogue redundant and just about everything is toned down to enable a film to get the lowest rating possible, it perhaps doesn’t come as a surprise to find that films like Van Helsing are the result.

The film is written and directed by the director of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, who seems to have reached a point where he believes his own hype and thinks he can get away with anything. As such he has taken the character Van Helsing from Stoker’s Dracula and pretty much rewritten everything about him, including his first name – the character now being Gabriel Van Helsing, because apparently Abraham didn’t suit. This re-imagined Van Helsing is someone who appears to be hundreds of years old, with little memory of a past that went before he was recruited by a secret order within the Vatican to fight evil. As such Van Helsing is fresh returned from Paris having fought with Mr. Hyde, to find his next operation is to travel to Transylvania, where he will help fight vampires. Of course the vampire in question is Dracula, who has werewolf servants, and is trying to harness the science of Dr. Frankenstein to bring life to his offspring.

The result is a mix of hideous acting and clumsy plot devices – Kate Beckinsale’s motivation purely to provide an abundance of artificial sexuality, backed up by simpering and pathetic vampire brides who grow increasingly irritating, through which a practically monosyllabic Jackman pouts in dark and mysterious fashion. The culmination of this nonsense comes together in Dracula’s castle, where we find ourselves in hysterics of laughter, as the film makers forget the layout of the building from scene to scene as it suits them, resulting in bare walls vanishing, and people swinging on ropes from location to location in the most convenient fashion. Increasingly one hopes that films like this will provide some amusement, because it is too rare for them to actually be worthwhile on their own merits, here however we are left cringing with embarrassment.