- Title: Van Helsing
- IMDb: link
Spooky Saturday takes a look back at a film that was decidedly not. Tom Cruise‘s The Mummy wasn’t the only film to kill a revival of Universal Pictures’ monsters before it ever got started. 13 years earlier that honor went to Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, and Van Helsing. While a financial success, the negative response to the film killed any similar future projects for more than a decade.
The film stars Jackman as the legendary vampire hunter Van Helsing, who for some reason is given an amnesiac backstory that never truly pays off. Working for the Vatican, Van Helsing is sent to keep Anna (Beckinsale) and Velkan Valerious (Will Kemp) alive because of their familial line being tied to Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) in a muddled bit of storytelling. The film also works in werewolves, Mr. Hyde (Robbie Coltrane), Frankenstein’s Monster (Shuler Hensley), and Dracula’s brides (Elena Anaya, Silvia Colloca, and Josie Maran) and unborn children (more CGI nonsense).
So what went wrong? Roxburg’s Dracula, only out of the conversation for worst Dracula due to the existence of Blade: Trinity, certainly didn’t help. But we can’t lay all the blame there. The script by writer/director Stephen Sommers is a mess, which the studio attempted to hide behind a boatload of CGI and and the likeability of its two stars. The pieces connecting werewolves and the pathetic Frankenstein’s Monster don’t work. As a brain-dead CGI smorgasbord it succeeds, but as anything else it fails miserably. But more than that, the film simply isn’t any fun (although some have put it into the “so bad it’s good” category).
Van Helsing is a less successful version of what The Mummy and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen also attempted to do in breathing new life into classic characters. While neither of those were ultimately successful either, they weren’t the complete miss that Van Helsing turned out to be. Poorly plotted and miserably executed, Van Helsing is more a collection of action scenes bursting with CGI than an actual film with questionable plot-heavy elements sandwiched in-between to give the illusion of coherent storytelling. It’s one of those films you might end up with a better experience watching with the volume off, or in a different language, and making up your own story. It’s unlikely you would have a worse experience.
Watch the trailer
