Van Helsing (Film)

Title: Van Helsing (12)

Year: 2004

Running Time: 131 minutes

Director: Steven Sommers

Cast: Hugh Jackman (Gabriel Van Helsing), Kate Beckinsale (Anna Valerious), Richard Roxburgh (Dracula)

Notes: Won one award and one negative award

Rating:  4

Thoughts:   As Dracula is on the rise, monster hunter Van Helsing is sent by the Knights of the Holy Order to destroy him.

This is a mash-up of various literary monster tales but ends up as a mess up of confused ideas littered with CGI.

Van Helsing is played fairly predictably as he fights Mr. Hyde and ends up leaving Dr. Jekyll dead. He recalls little and it's clear there is something secret in his life. Given the nods to so many black-and-white horror films, it was easy to guess.

We switch to Anna, part of a family vowed to destroy Dracula, as she and an accomplice battle a werewolf controlled by Dracula. Of course, Van Helsing and his helper arrive in the middle of this.

It then becomes a rollercoaster of fused tales that were never intended to come together. Others have done this but a lot more successfully. Here they seem to rely too much on the characters as we know them elsewhere, rather than giving them standalone characters here.

There's a whole load of brooding Jackman as he wrestles with his weaknesses and by the end he's welcome to them. None of the cast really do anything that wrong, it's just a limp tale that feels like a fan of the fragments didn't know how to put them together,