Van Helsing

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Here's a question. Does 2004's Van Helsing hold up? No, not really. Don't get me wrong, I honestly love this movie. It's over the top. It's cheesy. It's campy. To be honest, I do kind of wonder if that's the point. This movie is directed by Stephen Somers (who also directed the first two Brendan Fraser Mummy movies), and the man has admitted to being a fan of the classic Universal movie monsters. The plot is surprisingly complicated. Van Helsing (played by Hugh Jackman) works as something of an assassin for a secret church order based in Rome. They send him to aid a beautiful woman named Anna (played by Kate Beckinsale), who is the last in her family line, kill Dracula (played by Richard Roxburgh). Dracula wants to use Frankenstein's Monster to bring his thousands of dead, bloodthirsty children to life so that they can hunt and feed. Suffice it to say, this movie is far from being high art. There are legitimate parts of the story that don't make sense, or are so stupid they probably don't work nearly as well as they should. One of the movie's plot twists (spoiler for a movie that's almost fifteen years old) is that Van Helsing's name is Gabriel, and that he is the right hand of God. Yeah, I don't really know how I feel about this plot twist. Richard Roxburgh's performance as Dracula is horrible, but it almost feels suitably over the top, which kind of makes me forgive it. It's clear, the man's just having fun and hamming it up. Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale were probably the only two people who were legitimately attempting to take the movie seriously to some extent. Because of this, they are the best performances in the movie. The sheer amount of monsters in the movie does overstuff it a bit. This movie alone features Dracula, Dracula's brides, Frankenstein's monster, the wolf man, Igor, and Mr. Hyde. The mix of action and horror doesn't always blend as well as it should or could. If you want to build up a gothic atmosphere, having it followed up with a bombastic action scene doesn't always work as well as it could. It can easily end with tonal whiplash. The special effects are also pretty bad (something that regularly seems to plague a lot of Stephen Somers's movies). For example, the idea of how werewolves transform in this movie is kind of cool, but the bad special effects just kind of undercut the idea. One of the character deaths in the movie really doesn't work for me either, simply because this character had already survived much worse. Besides that, this death comes out of nowhere. Ultimately, Van Helsing is not a good movie (especially when you remove nostalgia goggles), but I still love it as a guilty pleasure.

6 / 10