May 7, 2004 | Van Helsing, the latest monster mash from writer-director StephenSommers (The Mummy, The MummyReturns), is a chaotic blur of recycled archetypes from classic horror flicks, action sequences unbound by laws of gravity and physics, and CGI special effects that somehow manage to appear ridiculously expensive and unconvincingly obvious all at once. Add Alan Silvestri’s aggressively thunderous musical score to the mix, and you have a textbook example of popcorn movie as blunt instrument – the kind of summer-blockbuster behemoth that seeks to pummel its audience into docile, deafened submission.
Adhering to the same playbook he followed for his Mummy diptych, Sommers once again has raided the film vaults at Universal Pictures to unearth iconography from cult-fave scary movies of the 1930s and ’40s. Also once again, he makes everything he uncovers bigger, louder and, in the case of the title character, younger and hunkier.
No longer an aging scientist who moonlights as a vampire slayer, this Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman, game but grim) is a swashbuckling, globe-trotting, late-19 th-century adventurer who’s employed as an all-purpose monster demolisher by a super-secret agency with headquarters in the basement of the Vatican. (When he wasn’t rifling through the Universal archives for inspiration, perhaps Sommers screened John Carpenter’s Vampires as well.) Imagine Indiana Jones shooting silver bullets, and you get the general idea.
Armed with anachronistic weaponry of the sort routinely employed by Robert Conrad back in The Wild, Wild West – well, OK, Conrad never used Gatling guns that spew silver stakes, but you get the idea – Van Helsing makes his killer entrance by laying the smackdown on a computer-generated Mr. Hyde in the tower of Notre Dame Cathedral. (Obviously, Quasimodo sublet the place.) After that, he’s off to Transylvania to get medieval on the swaggeringly suave Count Dracula (an amusingly self-satisfied Richard Roxburgh), who is busy forging an unholy alliance with a rabid Wolf Man (more CGI) and a reluctant Frankenstein’s Monster (Shuler Hensley).
Kate Beckinsale co-stars as Anna Valerious, purportedly the last in a long line of would-be vampire exterminators in a village near Dracula’s castle. After her appearances here and in last year’s Underworld, where she was showcased in formfitting catsuits while playing a super-heroic vampire, it’s safe to assume she is the new pin-up of choice for hormonally inflamed monster-movie geeks everywhere. Unfortunately, neither her emoting nor her acrobatics in VanHelsing can be judged as up to her usual standards.
To give the movie fair credit, bits and pieces – indeed, huge meaty chunks – are undeniably impressive on the level of breakneck spectacle. Trouble is, there simply is too much going on – too often, too noisily – for Van Helsing to be more entertaining than exhausting. It doesn’t help much that many scenes are edited and choreographed so frenetically, and confusingly, that you can’t always tell who is where in relationship to what. And it doesn’t help at all that the slipshod storyline, shot through with gaping plot holes and logical gaps, seems nothing more than an excuse to string together ever-more-gigantic action set pieces.
Sitting through the 132 minutes of Van Helsing is a lot like riding a rollercoaster for, oh, I dunno, maybe 15 or 20 consecutive go-rounds, all the while seated next to someone who incessantly shouts in your ear: “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this fun?ISN’T THIS FUN?!?!?” Call it overkill, and you won’t be far off the mark.
