Summary
Hugh Jackman, whom I think we all think we all know and love from X-Men, or possibly from the Broadway musical The Boy From Oz, stars in this ill-conceived mess as Van Helsing, a cross between Batman, Indiana Jones, and James Bond who works for a shadowy society of quasi-religious figures hunting down 19th century literary monsters and other offenses against God. He will face his greatest challenge (and perhaps find a key to his own mysterious past) when he travels to Transylvania with his wacky sidekick to save a hot girl in a corset and her entire family from an eternity of purgatory by killing Count Dracula.
Warning! Spoilers ahead!
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Barbara's Rant
Every now and then someone comes up with the bright idea to take a whole mess of monsters, throw them into a blender and call it a movie. House of Frankenstein, Neon Maniacs, House of Dracula, Destroy All Monsters, and now - Van Helsing! Maybe it's possible to make one of these multi-monster extravaganzas work, but I have yet to see it happen. There simply isn't time in a normal length movie to really explore that many monsters, so the movie ends up like a high school American History course. It skims the surface of a lot of issues, but fails to truly analyze anything. It presents a lot of facts, but no real depth. Students, be they patrons of the local video store or ninth graders just trying to make it to their sophomore year, come away from the experience no wiser than they were before.
Van Helsing is actually the worst example of this phenomenon I've ever seen, probably because, not content with combining the familiar faces of Mr. Hyde (see footnote), a werewolf (two, actually), Count Dracula, his three brides, and Frankenstein's monster, it also made up those little devil-munchkins, threw in an entire ballroom full of anonymous vampires, and gave birth to who knows how many CG vampire babies. At a conservative estimate of ten munchkins, a hundred extra vampires, and five hundred babies, that works out to a mean monster screen time of only about 12.8 seconds per monster. (I am, of course, using mean in its mathematical sense, here. I'm not trying to claim that there was only a vicious monster on screen for 12.8 seconds, which is clearly untrue.)
All right, I admit, that's a flawed statistic, as there was often more than one monster on the screen at the same time, but lots of people twist the numbers around to suit their purposes, why can't I? I could even do more of it if I wanted to. All those bonus vampires and baby vampires also pull the modal and the median value of monster screen time in this movie down to somewhere in the vicinity of one or two minutes. Misleading mathematical analysis aside, my basic contention is that this script spread itself far too thin on the monster front.
Of course, the heroes are nothing to write home about either. Van Helsing himself is tolerable, though his mission of self-discovery is rather cliche. His sidekick, Carl the Horny Friar, couldn't be more annoying if he spent two hours scraping his fingernails on a chalkboard. Anna is obviously more concerned with her personal appearance than she is with her family's eternal salvation. Why else would she prance around town decked out like a medieval dominatrix? Hasn't she ever heard of sensible shoes?
Both Anna and her brother seem to have inherited the official family lack of personality along with the official family quest, not to mention the official family poor planning abilities and the official family weak communication skills. It's no wonder these people have spent seven generations failing to kill, or even find, Count Dracula. Anna's father never bothered to tell his children what he knew or suspected about the whereabouts of Dracula's lair, Anna never bothered to tell Van Helsing that staking Dracula through the heart doesn't work, and Anna and her brother between them don't have the common sense to give the only gun loaded with silver bullets to someone other than the guy who's going to be dangling over the ravenous werewolf from a rope.
Speaking of people dangling from ropes, I think fully a quarter of this movie dealt with people dangling from, swinging from, and/or climbing ropes! Enough already!
In summary, to paraphrase MST3K, which I try to do at every possible opportunity, "This movie is nothing but ropes and monsters!"
Footnote: Did anyone else think Mr. Hyde looked like Shrek? If they had to pervert Mr. Hyde (who, by the way, is, in the book, described as being much smaller than Henry Jekyll. Maybe the designer got him confused with the Incredible Hulk.) into a gargantuan CG monkey-man, couldn't they at least have made him look less like a cartoon character? And they didn't have enough monsters lying around already; they had to make a bizarre allusion to the Hunchback of Notre Dame, too?
BARBARA JO
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