Dracula Dumbed Down
The H-Bomb: Welcome to 15th century Transylvania, where almost everyone speaks English with an English accent. This land is ruled by Vlad the Impaler (Luke Evans), who is shown here to be a brave warrior, a loving husband, a doting father, and an all around nice guy (oh dear). Vlad wants nothing more than to live in peace with his people, however, there are these pesky Turks being led by supreme douche bag, Mehmed (Dominic Cooper), who wants to conquer all of Europe. Mehmed is willing to leave Transylvania alone, so long as Vlad gives him a generous donation in silver… along with 1,000 Transylvanian boys to join and fight in the Turkish army, including Vlad’s own son, Ingeras (Art Parkinson).
Vlad is not so cool with that last part, and decides he’s just going to have to show this supreme douche bag that he too can get down and douchey. Problem is, Vlad doesn’t really have much of an army to fight Mehmed with. What he does have, however, is some fugly ass Golem creature (Charles Dance, creepy awesome) living in a cave, who happens to be a vampire. After some back and forth negotiations, this cave dwelling nosferatu has Vlad drink some blood… and Vlad is forever changed.
He is much faster, much stronger, and can do all sorts of cool shit like turn himself into a swarm of bats. But there are downsides to his new condition, like not being able to go out in the sunlight, being allergic to crosses and silver, and this thirst for human blood that just won’t go away. Whatever. Vlad doesn’t have time to fret over such minor little issues, he has a war to fight. He may have these bad ass vampire super powers, but Mehmed has an army of 100,000 men. Who will emerge the victor? Well, Dracula is now a household name, and no one has ever even heard of this Mehmed guy, so take a wild guess.
Thus far, on the cinematic front, this Halloween season is shaping up to be a pretty damn dreary one. I didn’t think movies could get any more generic than last week’s Annabelle, but alas, along comes Dracula Untold to prove me dead wrong. Intended as the start of a new franchise for Universal, a Dracula Begins, if you will, this thing is more lifeless than its undead lead character. It’s not even a bad film, per se, it’s just so utterly bland and mediocre that it ends up being bad by default.
Take any of the lesser films in the Dracula canon, such as the Frank Langella Dracula, the Francis Coppola Dracula, and even that shit-roast Dracula 2000, they are all preferable to Dracula Untold, because even though they weren’t great, and in some cases flat out terrible, they at least are somewhat memorable and give people something to talk about. Dracula Untold, running at a scant 90 minutes, is a shell of a movie, one that at the time of this writing, I screened less than 24 hours ago, and am really racking my brain to remember anything about it.
It should be made clear that this is an action movie, not a horror film. An action movie where most of the action looks like it was lifted straight from your favorite video game (from about nine or ten years ago). Debuting director Gary Shore did come up with a couple of inspired battle sequences, particularly one where Dracula takes the form of bats, and swarms the Turkish army. Trouble is, so much of the action takes place in the murky dark, that it’s near impossible to tell what’s happening most of the time. Another problem is the pussified PG-13 rating. Come on, this is a movie about Vlad the fucking Impaler, the guy who used to shove stakes up people’s asses and out their mouths, and decorate his front lawn with them. Instead, we get Vlad the nice Impaler, and a shitload of blandly bloodless violence and CGI faux-grit. Fuck that noise.
This vacuous picture could have been saved had they cast the right actor in the lead. Someone like a Gerard Butler, who has real presence and weight. Instead, we have Luke Evans, who looks better suited for a Twilight picture. It doesn’t help that the script, by Matt Sazama and the aptly named Burk Sharpless, makes Vlad a good guy at heart. Dracula wasn’t really a monster, he only became one when he needed to… fuck you and the headless horse you rode in on! Speaking of missed casting opportunities, there’s Dominic Cooper, who was so great in The Devil’s Double, but here he’s completely wasted in this one-note role as the constantly sneering villain. He doesn’t even come off as evil, just incredibly… douche baggy.
In the unlikely chance you haven’t caught on, I am telling you not to go see Dracula Untold, for doing so would be an egregious waste of your time and money. Again, it’s not exceptionally bad, it’s just really not good, and life is just too short to waste on this kind of dull, colorless mediocrity. There have been many great films spun from Bram Stoker’s novel (Dracula 1931, Horror of Dracula, Nosferatu and its remake, to name a few), go watch one of those, instead. This would be franchise starter is (un)dead on arrival.
