I
loved Van Helsing. I figured that all of my friends would have loved
it too, but surprisingly I heard a fair amount of ho-humming when I asked
them what they thought. I got a lot of, "Eh, it was
alright." Honestly, that confuses me a bit because I thought
that it ruled! So this afternoon I spent a little time thinking and
rethinking what I thought about it and I came to the conclusion,... yes,
it does indeed rule!
My
favorite character in the whole movie was Count Dracula. Generally,
Dracula is depicted as this ultra-serious and dour figure driven to his
own extinction by sheer arrogance and hunger. Well, Richard
Roxburgh's version is definitely arrogant, but he's far from
dour. He's sarcastic, thoughtful, sometimes forgiving, and even
playful. Too often in movies like this the villain follows any
setback with the immediate execution of a valuable underling. This
Dracula sees Igor's failure to recreate Dr. Frankenstein's transformation
of life from death reasonably. Instead of casting him off to his
vampire brides for dinner, he essentially says, "Well, it looks like
Dr. Frankenstein took his secret of life with him to the grave. Keep
trying Igor, I'm a patient guy." When I heard that, I perked
up. That never happens!! I've always been frustrated with
antagonists who expect all of their little plans to go perfect all the
time and blow away any employee that screws up just once. This
Dracula thinks, "Well, Igor isn't the genius that the good
doctor was, but he watched him work... we have all of the equipment...
Igor does seem to be making progress... and the reason that the experiment
is failing has nothing to do with him directly. Do I then kill him
and let the mindless robo-jawas work without him? No way! I'll
eat someone less important if I'm hungry." Another thing I
loved about Dracula was that he was impressible. Too often the
arrogant vampire lord is portrayed in such a way that if a pink elephant
appeared before him and a hundred clowns leaped out of it's butt waving
flags he would say, "Yesss. Thisss I expected, you foooolssss!"
But not this Dracula. There is a point in the climax of the movie
when he greatly underestimates his foe, and when his true colors blossom
Dracula is oozing with shocked laughter! I nearly fell out of my
chair because when transformation occurred I cried, "WHOAAAAH!!!"
and then they cut to Dracula and he was also saying "WHOAAAAH!!!"
It was awesome man!
There was a lot more I liked
about the movie, but I think that I'll add to this review a little later
when I think about it some more.