Originally posted 5/29/04
Van Helsing
Director: Stephen Sommers
Writer: Stephen Sommers
Producer: Stephen Sommers, Bob Ducsay
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham, Shuler Hensley
How cool is that?, writer-director-producer Stephen Sommers seems to be saying with every flourish of over-emphatic music, every digital monster leaping into frame, every shot of figures swinging across endless chasms. How cool is that?
I regret to answer: not very.
It’s not that he lacks for resources. First, he has at his disposal heavyweights of movie-monster-dom like Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), Frankenstein’s Monster (Shuler Hensley), and the Wolfman; plus a cameo by another famous literary beast. One fantasizes about how Godzilla might somehow be invited to the party.
And second, you can see the expense on screen. Cinematographer Allen Daviau (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) and production designer Allan Cameron (Willow, and Sommers’ two Mummy movies) lavish the screen with their work. Even the gorgeously-dilapidated windmill Frankenstein’s Monster is chased into by the de rigeur torch-wielding angry mob looks expensive. Whenever smoke and fog were needed, I suspect they simply burned piles of $100 bills.
No, where Sommers fails to make Van Helsing cool is – and this one has a pesky way about it – in his script, which knots itself into an irreconcilable mass of arbitrary fantasy rules that, in the end, fail to prop up the absurd plot.
I can’t get too far into many of its convolutions without giving away climactic secrets, but I will try. Since when is that the only thing that can kill Dracula? Why is that the only way Dracula’s plan can come into fruition? And where is the suspense in setting a deadline around the 12th stroke of midnight when you have the slowest-ringing clock ever built?
Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), the last surviving descendant of a family whose ancestors can’t enter heaven until they kill Dracula, strikes a pose and boasts – “nothing can outrun Transylvanian horses!” And you might think – how cool is that?, except that in the very next scene, pretty much everything our heroes were trying to outrun is outrunning the Transylvanian horses. So what was the point?
Let’s get on with the story. Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is an enforcer for a secret order of the Catholic Church, traveling the globe and vanquishing evil spirits. Since most of the population doesn’t know the people he is killing are possessed, he’s a wanted man. Posters everywhere show his menacing eyes and snappy hat. My advice is, since that is all they recognize about you, get a new hat.
Call him the Vatican’s James Bond – we even have that chestnut scene where he goes to H.Q., gets his assignment, and picks up his weaponry from the testy comic-relief designer (David Wenham). This time, he is dispatched to Transylvania, whose economy is clearly based around gathering in angry mobs. The residents never do anything with their farm tools but wave them menacingly. He is to help Anna and her brother Velkan (Will Kemp) destroy Dracula and his three brides (Elena Anaya, Silvia Colloca, Josie Maran). This plan eventually involves both the sympathetic Frankenstein’s Monster and the snarling Wolfman.
Van Helsing lost his memory, and keeps doing the Lord’s work in the hopes that he will get it back. His ring matches an insignia on a Transylvanian artifact that we are told Will Be Important To The Plot Later, so there’s a chance, on this one, that maybe he’ll learn a bit more about his past. He does, sort of, although as with every detail in this movie, it raises at least as many questions as it answers.
We also begin to wonder just how heroic Van Helsing really is, since he succeeds more through dumb luck and the work of his supporting cast than anything. When the movie is over, we think back and realize that he would never have had a chance to win at all if he had not bungled a prior action sequence.
Jackman proves himself, yet again, to be a true movie star, selling every half-witted line while never seeming to work too hard. He wears the outfit well, and if this is his audition to be the next James Bond, he gets high marks from me. Beckinsale is as beautiful as ever despite her dubious Boris-and-Natasha accent. I think back wistfully to the days of Cold Comfort Farm and hope that someone sees past her looks soon and gives her something worthy of her talents.
But a pre-emptive Golden Raspberry Award must be reserved for Roxburgh, who I thought had already earned himself all-time overacting infamy as The Duke in Moulin Rouge! Here, this graduate of the esteemed Australian National Institute for Dramatic Arts goes beyond Ham, beyond Camp…hell, he goes Beyond Thunderdome. This is scenery-chewing the likes of which we may never see again.
Every so often we cut back to his lair, where he exchanges quips with his ever-whining brides, beats his chest, and moans about his filthy desires. I kept thinking of some bad variety show, or those host segments Elvira used to do around horror movies. With every pseudo-witty rejoinder, I wanted to see an audience of drag queens hooting and cheering. There’s something captivating yet dreadful about it all.
If recent years have taught us nothing, it’s that you can spend millions on digital effects and they will still end up looking bad if we’re too bored to do anything but examine them. When Bruce, the mechanical shark, just couldn’t land on the boat the right way in Jaws, Steven Spielberg (whom Sommers clearly aspires to emulate) said with confidence that it wouldn’t matter if this shot didn’t look completely realistic, because at this point in the movie, he would have us. And he was right.
Van Helsing hits overload before ten minutes have even passed, doing its damndest to wow us with set piece after set piece after set piece. And by doing so, it doesn’t have us. Sommers tries to seduce us by shouting pick-up lines for two hours straight with hardly a breath in between; and wisely, we tune out and examine the scenery.
This is not an offensive movie, not some self-important Michael Bay-helmed assault on our senses and intelligence. It simply has the lazy hope to use its “popcorn movie” status to ward off scrutiny of the sloppy, ultimately uninvolving tale it has to tell. How unfortunate is that?