All right, this has been percolating in my soul now since I saw the movie with Izzat some night ago, so I know it's good and ripe and pure. What I am about to tell you is absolutely the truth: Seeing Van Helsing is like being punched in the imagination.
I can't put it to you, my dear readers, any more plain than that. It's really that simple.
"But wait, Aida," you're probably protesting, "The previews actually looked okay, even that part where the team of horses somehow jumps over the bridge together without breaking their legs or tripping or dying." *rolls eyes*
I know, I know, it does look like there's a lot to recommend the movie. It manages to throw together just about all of the Victorian-era classical movie monsters into a single film, and there are guns and shooting and comically graphic violence. There are even alumni from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (David Wenham a.k.a Faramir son of the psycho Denethor) slumming as supporting characters. Hugh Jackman seems like he's due for a hit in a non-Wolverine role, and gosh! darn that Kate Beckinsale, she's just so cute; sure, it could be well worth your RM10--
Nay.
Bad movies jab your imagination. They set it up, and then they throw a huge haymaker right into its jaw, leaving you stunned and wondering if you'll ever get excited about anything ever again. They taunt you with promise, lure you with the possibility for excitement, and then punish you with the same stuff that you've seen about seventy-five times before.
In the case of Van Helsing, it's a combination of several kinds of stuff you've seen before: Literary revisionism, like that of the execrable LXD: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; super-spy gadgetry, like that of the ambivalence-breeding Die Another Day (or any James Bond movie, for that) *I swear I can almost feel Abah glaring at me* and finally, the monster-movie CGI mayhem of The Mummy and its sequel, The Mummy Returns (But-Really-Not-Really, Sort-of-The-Rock-Is-The Bad-Guy-Now). This last point is particularly important, because Van Helsing springs from the same mind and camera as The Mummy films, Stephen Sommers.
I remember seeing The Mummy for the first time, I remember thinking that I was in for a horror movie, because that's how it was marketed – terrifying monster on the loose, re-make of the classic where the monster lurches painfully and yet no-one can seem to run away fast enough -- but ended up seeing some kind of weird fusion of Indiana Jones and Army of Darkness. I think I was the only person who laughed when Brendan Fraser was beating the crap out of helpless skeletons, and I remember wondering why. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time that you could have a goofy, self-deprecating horror-action flick, as long as it moved fast enough.
The Mummy Returns was the same kind of situation, except that there was more going on with ‘The Rock’ and Patricia Velasquez and some blonde kid, plus there was about four hundred percent more CGI than should legally have been allowed. But there was also more Brendan Fraser, about which one must never complain, and he is the kind of actor who can seem earnest enough to carry the movie. I don't know if I'm prepared to say that Fraser is the action star of the future -- the fact that he has since starred in a Looney Toons live-action movie certainly says he isn't -- but he at least had the right qualities to carry a movie meant to be light, funny and a bit scary all at the same time.
Hugh Jackman? I don't know. I like the guy, he's hot but when he is being Serious about being Wolverine, it works because Wolverine is largely a humourless character. Yeah so he cracks wise, but there's no winking at the screen when you're a character who's all about the slashing of people with metal claws and screaming, "RRRAAAAAAHHHHHHRRRRRR!" But when he tries the same approach with Van Helsing, it just comes off all weird and disorienting *not to borrow too much from Abah*. Are we really supposed to believe his internal conflict when he blows a hole in Mr. Hyde and throws him off the roof of Notre Dame? Wouldn't it be much more awesome for him to just scorn and whirl his cape? Am I there to watch escapist fantasy, or see someone wrestle with the unique emotional strife that comes with killing monsters?
Jackman plays it straight, but I don't know if it's really his fault. Van Helsing is supposed to be cool, garish, brave, tortured and adventurous all at once, so the character is about as much of a mish-mash as the movie itself. Just like you're never sure if Van Helsing is being goofily brave or genuinely courageous, you can't be sure if the movie is trying to actually thrill you or is just making a joke at its own expense. The plot doesn't help either: It somehow tries to tie Dracula together with Viktor Frankenstein, Transylvania and the Wolfman, to tell a story about a very odd Dracula who is engaged in the weirdest kind of fertility science. There are parts of the movie that make you wonder if you fell asleep for fifteen minutes because so many things have happened off-screen, and at least one revelation is so genuinely confusing that Izzat with me actually said, "Whaaaaaa?" out loud. Well, Izzat never say anything out loud during movies (or at a concert.. ZzzzzzZZ). It was just me howling but he wore that _ expression undoubtedly.
Plus, there's a big giveaway: Kate Beckinsale.
People, I know she's pretty. And I know a lot of people think she's got credibility because of The Last Days of Disco, but the more I see her in movies, the more I'm convinced that she's the adorable brunette kiss of death. Not that she does a bad job or anything as ‘Whatever Whoever- anova, the heroine and designated love interest’ (I can’t remember her character’s name) -- it's just that Kate Beckinsale almost always finds herself in these action movies that take themselves way too seriously, and end up being hilarious for all the wrong reasons.
And before you say another thing, two words: Pearl Harbor. Don't argue. Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor, the movie about the two guys who slept with the same chick, then one of them died and other one buried him in his front yard while he lives happily ever after with the chick and the dead guy's love child. Oh yeah, and then there was the war, too, where I think some people got shot by the Japanese in Hawaii or something. Pearl Harbor was Kate Beckinsale's first warning to the world that when she's tapped for a major Hollywood project, it's going to stink like the worst kind of you know what in the sewer. She may, herself, end up looking like a pretty good actress, or at the very least end up looking pretty good, but the movie itself will reek to high heaven.
No, no, don't go bringing up all those straight-to-video movies of hers, the ones of which Blockbuster only ever orders one copy. Don't tell me she's a solid British actor who's just getting paycheques from America, because I have one more word for you: Underworld. Tut tut! And if that isn't enough to totally convince you, what about: Untitled Underworld Sequel, coming your way in 2005?
Yeah, now you see.
The problem with Van Helsing isn't the CGI, it isn't the script, and it isn't even the mad and peculiar stunts that defy all the laws of God and physics. No, it's that the movie doesn't really know what it wants to be. It actually disagrees with itself about that, wobbling uncomfortably between serial-style adventure and campy drive-in badness. I am willing to forgive either, as long as they are done with conviction -- a wilfully bad movie is just as entertaining as a seriously-done epic -- but it's impossible to like a movie that isn't even sure it likes itself.
Spare your imagination the beating. Go see Mean Girls instead.
10 years ago
