A kind of hollow summer movie

To me, it would have shown a dash more wit if the lead character in Van Helsing, played by Hugh Jackman, wore only Van Heusen outfits and listened to Van Halen as he dispatched werewolves, vampires and other social deviants. As it is, there’s not much humor or charm to be found in this noisy CGI-driven summer movie. Ostensibly, it pays tribute to Universal Pictures and its original gallery of monsters – Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman – creatures that were box-office sensations in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Indeed, the opening of Van Helsing alludes to the gothic tone of those movies – the cracks of lightning, the mountaintop castle, the art-deco laboratory of Dr. Victor Frankenstein – but it quickly becomes clear that this film is in service to the comic-book sensibility driving most Hollywood special effects movies, not to the original Universal Monsters, as corny as they may be.

Irony rears its ugly head early on, as Jackman (playing the renowned vampire hunter Van Helsing) starts spieling off one-liners that are not only anachronistic, they’re not even worthy of X-Men. This is, after all, an action-hero Van Helsing, more at home with automatic stake guns and silver-bladed gadgets than the scholarly Van Helsing of yore. It’s the 19th century, and the good doctor is sent to Transylvania to track down the 400-year-old Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh, looking unrecognizable from his mustachioed turn in Moulin Rouge). With the help of his vampire brides, Dracula has captured Frankenstein’s monster, and is using his celebrated electrical charge to energize a hatching ground of fresh, nasty vampire eggs. That’s right: Frankenstein is reduced to being an electrical conductor, which is a far cry from his original box-office clout when Boris Karloff played the role back in 1931.

Jackman, looking a bit uncomfortable in his leather jacket and hat, has a sidekick friar named Carl (David Wenham) who demonstrates all the latest vampire-hunting technology in a scene reminiscent of Q showing off all the new gadgets to 007. (No surprise there, since Jackman is a hair’s breadth away from inheriting the James Bond franchise.) They encounter Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), who plays the last survivor of a clan nearly wiped out by Dracula and sports an accent as thick as a hearty goulash.

This all should be a lot of fun, but it’s not. Director Stephen Sommers was also responsible for The Mummy, another loud, bludgeoning blockbuster that had the curious effect of putting this viewer to sleep a few years back. I must confess I also slept through patches of Van Helsing, so I’m not really sure about its finer plot points. Let’s just say that the good vampire hunter gets bitten somewhere en route to tracking down Drac and turns into Wolverine.

I suppose one could enjoy this kind of hollow summer movie, in the right frame of mind. I’m just not sure what that frame of mind would be. Obviously, everyone else in the theater enjoyed it, since the theater was packed and I was the only one squirming. Could be they were pinioned to their seats by the sledgehammer sound track, with its skull-throbbing whooshes and crashes. Hard to tell.

Despite good intentions, I believe Sommers has no idea what made the old Universal movies great in the first place. Sure, they were clunky, often with B-movie budgets, leaden scripts and wooden acting. Yes, those times were very different. Now they have huge budgets, leaden scripts and wooden acting. In the old days, people were entertained enough by seeing Karloff’s Frankenstein makeup, or Bela Lugosi’s stage-y turn as The Count. They were thrilled by the on-screen transformation of Lon Chaney, Jr. into the Wolfman. That stuff just won’t fly nowadays, they say. True, but what made the Universal movies great was a dark Expressionistic look (often provided by immigrant directors and cinematographers schooled in German Expressionism, such as Karl Freund). The Gothic look achieved by Universal became watered down over the years, but got new life with the British Hammer remakes of the ‘50s and ‘60s (some of the forest tracking shots in Van Helsing seem to evoke Hammer). Anyway, what those early films created was an art form based on honest, homegrown materials – not CGI-created cliffsides and zooming bat brides. Say what you will: there is more honest creepiness in Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932) – especially the crackling sound of Karloff’s Prince Im-Hotep awakening from his shroud – than there is in all of Van Helsing.

That’s because Van Helsing is presented as a joke. And as we know, old monster movies are meant to be a postmodern joke, something that modern hipsters refer to with a wink and a sneer ("It’s alive!"). But Van Helsing is impossible to take seriously, even as a joke. It doesn’t have a consistent vision or the courage of its own (admittedly meager) convictions. Jackman and Beckinsale are trying so hard to sell out to Hollywood, yet the material lets them down. The special effects (particularly the makeup) are second-class, despite all the whizzing and zooming about. And the ending is straight out of Ghost.

So go, if you must: see Van Helsing, make these Hollywood buffoons even richer, and ensure that more pointless, bludgeoning stupidity arrives at your local theaters. But realize the only thing that is definitively killed in Van Helsing is the Universal Monster franchise. At least for another 50 years.