Van Helsing



I love monster movies, so I really wanted to like Van Helsing, written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Sommers wrote and directed The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001), neither of which I particularly liked because they were so dumb. I guess I hoped that split among three more Universal monsters (Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's Monster) the dumb wouldn't bother me as much.

Little did I know. Sommers wrote in ten times as much dumb to compensate.

Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is a secret monster hunter for a secret order that includes holy men from all the major religions but operates out of the Vatican. After killing Dr. Jekyll in Paris, the Vatican orders Van Helsing to Transylvania to kill Dracula. Dracula was behind the creation of Frankenstein's Monster, which he thinks will allow him to animate his children by his three vampire wives. (Vampires have dead children, apparently, and they're come out in Alien-esque pods.) Dracula also uses various versions of the Wolf Man he has enthralled against his enemies, the chief of which is Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), the scion of a family that has promised to kill Dracula.


The new New X-Men.

Van Helsing arrives in town just in time to meet-cute Anna as the brides attack. The brides are desperate to kill Anna before some deadline that the movie then completely forgets about. Anna's brother also happens to be most recent Wolf Man, which causes friction because Van Helsing's philosophy is that the only good non-human is a dead non-human. Of course they get over it, and after finding Frankenstein's Monster they vow to keep him away from Dracula.

In order for me to accurately express how dumb this movie is, each word in this sentence would have to make me lose 10 IQ points. Van Helsing is profoundly dumb. The plot doesn't make a lick of sense, concepts are introduced and dropped without ever being explained, characters do things for no reason other than to keep things nice and complicated. There's also a bizarre tendency for the movie to just pile as much as is humanly possible into a scene until it breaks. Two examples:

- Our introduction to Van Helsing occurs in Notre Dame Cathedral. He has tracked Dr. Jekyll (though really Mr. Hyde, but I don't think they called him that, presumably to differentiate themselves from last year's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) to the building, and the two have a fight. Jekyll actions (and one line of dialogue) bring to mind one of the famous Hunchback of Notre Dame, another Universal monster. On top of that, dialogue also suggests that Jekyll was also Jack the Ripper. So Van Helsing gets to kill three monsters in one body.

- There's a scene where Van Helsing and Anna try to transport Frankenstein's Monster to Rome in a fast carriage. On the way they get attacked by the Wolf Man. Gabriel and Anna fight the Wolfman on the outside of the carriage. Then the carriage catches on fire. And finally the carriage is running on a road that is inexplicably right on the edge of a cliff. There are so many dangers in this one scene I halfway expected to see Jackie Chan go flying by on top of a biplane.


For the protection of these actors, their identities have been hidden.

The end of the movie has some pretty good fights, but I had to sit through a lot of really stupid stuff. I tried to enjoy it, but scenes like the one where Van Helsing is bitten by a werewolf and the next morning told there are 48 hour until the next full moon just kept distracting me from what little good stuff there was.

Posted: Sun - May 9, 2004 at      

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