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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.
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