Van Helsing (2004) Review

Tagline: “The One Name They All Fear.”

Van Helsing (2004) Review

 

I’ve gone through three different eras of what I think about Van Helsing. The first, when I rented it from the video store at age ten: it’s awesome! So much action! So much violence! Loved it! The second, many years after I had bought the DVD and rewatched it for the first time as an adult, after becoming familiar with Universal Classic Monsters, in my more pompous horror aficionado era: it sucks. Stupid, aged horribly, not scary at all. My third and current era is kind of a hybrid of the earlier two. Van Helsing is, most certainly, a dumb movie, but writer/director Stephen Sommers understood the assignment, and my previous eras of opinions make sense looking back on the movie now. Four words: Pirates of the Caribbean.

Five years earlier, Sommers directed a reboot of The Mummy series for Universal, which was a big hit because it reduced the horror aspect and increased the action and thrills by taking pages from the Indiana Jones playbook. Sommers directed the sequel, The Mummy Returns, released in 2001, and both were successful. So, when Universal decided they wanted to do a reboot of their classic monsters lineup (minus Mummy) and looked at the other big successes from 2001-2003—The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, fantasy films full of action with horror influences from their directors who both had backgrounds in horror filmmaking—it was a no brainer to hire Sommers. I saw Pirates of the Caribbean the year before Van Helsing and absolutely loved it, so of course I would find lots to love, even though I didn’t connect the two in my mind back then, but unlike Pirates, Van Helsing was loathed by critics when it came out, and unlike The Mummy, not as many people fondly remember it as a fun time.

If you don’t know anything about Van Helsing, I’m not sure I can even do it justice, because it’s actually crazy how much stuff is crammed into this one movie. Hugh Jackman plays Gabriel Van Helsing—not the same dude from the original Dracula story. This Van Helsing isn't a supernatural specialist who vanquishes only vampires, he’s a monster hunting generalist working for The Vatican, introduced on a mission in Paris to kill Mr. Hyde: as in the evil alter ego of Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde is an ogre-like giant, which is ridiculous, but it’s actually a pretty sick fight, and sets us up for the kind of adventure we’re in for: a steroid-injected monster mash of unwieldly proportions! We’ve got Count Dracula and his three brides trying to bring life to his thousands of offspring, helped by the evil hunchbacked assistant Igor, using the technology of Dr. Frankenstein, as well as seeking his lost creation (as in the freaking Frankenstein Monster), with a werewolf as his muscle and a bunch of evil little dwarves that are like Jawas from Star Wars mixed with Oompa Loompas from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!

As if that’s not enough, there’s are two big mysteries sledgehammered into this already crammed plot. One is to do with Van Helsing’s origins, for he has no memory of where he came from (but you know immediately it has some kind of connection with these monsters), and the other is to do with Dracula’s connection to the Valerious family, with the only two surviving members being Anna (Kate Beckinsale) and her brother Velkan (Will Kemp). Velkan gets turned into a werewolf and Anna teams up with Van Helsing after she’s attacked by Dracula’s brides, with most of the movie built on one action sequence after the other, culminating in a crazy final battle in Dracula’s castle which brings all of the characters and monsters together.

Even though I would no longer say Van Helsing sucks, I still have many criticisms of it. The first and foremost is the story, with the visual effects being a close second. Even though criticism of the bad CGI monsters is abundant in many reviews, I’d say a greater portion of shots are acceptable for the early 2000s than not. Sure, there are plenty of effects that look absolutely whack, but there are also lots of great sets, well done makeup effects, and a few practical effects of note, like Dracula’s gooey cocoons for his babies. I can’t make any excuses for the writing, though. As soon as I start to think too hard about the story, it stops making sense. I’ve seen this movie many times, and I always forget what happens in the second half, because there are too many layers to it all, with Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster and Van Helsing’s connection to God that it becomes too convoluted and messy, but it’s also all in service of the action, which gets incredibly ridiculous very fast.

In terms of characters and performances, I like both Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale as the leads, but neither of them is giving their best performance here. Their casting makes sense (especially Beckinsale, who was starring in the Underworld films at the time), and they pull off the action scenes, but their dialogue is quite bad, and they don’t have the best romantic chemistry. I can’t say who has the better curls, though, Hugh or Kate. Both of them have peak hairdos in this movie. The Frankenstein Monster has a cool design, reminiscent of Boris Karloff’s but still distinct, with some nice nods to Mary Shelley’s source material, but he’s always yelling too much. I guess I’d be yelling too if I was created from multiple dead bodies and getting electrocuted all the time. The monster has no agency of his own once he’s recovered from the cave below the windmill, which I find bothersome. He’s always getting chained up, knocked out, transported from place to place, and doesn’t get to do enough in the climax, then just rows away on a raft at the end.

Remember Benny from The Mummy? I think that’s the reason for the addition of David Wenham’s character Friar Carl, who I wish was not in the movie at all. He’s there as an exposition dumper and comedic relief. He bumbles about, gets laid for saving a villager at one point, and assists the heroes as needed, but I just find him annoying. Even Igor (played by Kevin J. O’Conner, who also played Benny in The Mummy) is funnier with far less screen time and dialogue. My least favourite characters are Dracula’s brides. When they are in human form, they look like modern day exotic dancers and don’t really fit the 1800s aesthetic at all (though neither does Kate Beckinsale’s wardrobe, but I’ll forgive that), and when they’re in monster form their clothes morph into their pasty-white, featureless bodies, not to mention the CGI as they fly around doesn’t look very good, either. They also try to play up a sexy/flirty/funny/scary combo that just doesn’t work for me, but it kind of fits with the inconsistent level of campiness throughout.

And then there’s Richard Roxburgh as Dracula…I don’t know what this guy thought he was doing, but wow, did he ever commit to the role. When I first saw him, I was puzzled, put off, and annoyed by his performance as what’s supposed to be one of the scariest horror movie villains in history. Now, I both love how much I hate it and hate how much I love it. He’s extremely over the top, funny at times, cringe much of the time, and never once truly scary. He may not look as ridiculous as Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it is certainly one of the most absurd portrayals of the character on screen. I also find this Dracula's motivations questionable and his power levels inconsistent, but seeing Dracula battle a Werewolf at the end is pretty satisfying. Fun fact: Wolf Man vs. Dracula was a script written as a follow-up to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in the 40's but never made. It’s cool to see it finally happen, even if it looks cartoony at times. 

In my second era of hating this movie, I felt it was a massive disservice to the original Universal Monsters by making the whole thing so intentionally campy, and a poor excuse to stir them all into an unfrightening stew of CGI fights and fantastical action, but now we live in a world where Universal Studios tried to start a rebooted cinematic universe much more overtly with the instantly-failed Dark Universe. To compare The Mummy reboot starring Tom Cruise with Van Helsing, it makes Van Helsing look like a masterpiece. Even though it isn’t scary, obviously Universal wanted the movie to be more like Pirates of the Caribbean—make it scary, but not too scary, and have lots of action and some funny bits! And that’s what Van Helsing is. The opening sequence in black-and-white is a fun throwback to the 1930s origins of these properties, and for as much of the remixed lore that Sommers crammed into this story, it’s not all bad.

Once I had seen more of the classic monster movies this one apes off, I realized the continuity had never mattered, not even back then, so I can now more easily forgive the cherry-picking of certain character traits and creative choices for how to bring them all together. I’ll put a spoiler warning for anyone who cares, but I find it funny that Dracula’s only weakness is being killed by a werewolf, yet he has a werewolf help him only because the werewolf is loyal and doesn’t seem to know it’s capable of killing him, yet the creature is at the ready to attack literally anyone or anything else at any given moment. Even though it’s all CGI, the werewolf in Van Helsing is probably the best big-budget example of one from the 2000s, and has the highest genuine fright factor of all the monsters. If you want to see Hugh Jackman as a werewolf, the movie is worth watching just for that. Spoiler over!

Though there are efforts to inject some real horror into this primarily action-oriented supernatural adventure, most are half-hearted or incredibly cliché, including jump scares, creaky doors, and spooky shadows. It’s also a bit frustrating at times when there is so much violence yet a lack of blood. These monsters never frightened audiences with blood and guts back in the day, but it feels at odds with itself when there are beasts with huge sharp teeth tearing at each other, and yet, that’s just the way it goes when it’s PG-13. The werewolf transformation, though, is pretty intense, as he rips his human skin off to reveal the hairy beast within. Still, it’s yet another moment where the effects look dated.

Once I came to accept the lack of true horror and the embracement of action, I enjoyed the preposterous fun, perhaps even more than I did with Sommers’ Mummy movies. It’s entertaining to watch Van Helsing hunt these monsters down and ride around Transylvania, especially when his epic theme music by Alan Silvestri kicks in. I couldn’t possibly include every noteworthy moment in this review, but here are three. 1) Van Helsing blasts one of Dracula’s brides with machine gun speed using an automatic crossbow loaded with silver stakes. 2) A carriage pulled by half a dozen Transylvanian horses (which are even faster than a werewolf, apparently) makes an insane jump over a ravine with a broken bridge, as Van Helsing holds on for dear life. 3) Anna swings from an impossibly high height on a cable and does a midair flip to another rope to continue swinging to safety. At times the movie almost feels like an adaptation of the Castlevania videogames, and it might be the closest we’ll ever get to a cinematic live-action version.

Van Helsing is such an overstuffed, action-packed monster movie with so much lore connected to my love of classic monsters that it has resulted in this extensive review, verging on a retrospective essay, and yet I’m ending it all with saying…yeah, it’s fun, but it’s not great. Sorry to those who love it and sorry to anyone who expected a wholehearted recommendation after all that, but I think if you saw this one back when it came out and haven’t revisited it in a while, it’s still worth a watch. If you’re coming in fresh, though, just keep in mind the cheesy layers over the largely self-serious, retooled conglomeration of those old school monsters, or skip it if you want something genuinely good and scary.