DRACULA UNTOLD
DIRECTOR: Gary Shore
CAST: Luke Evans, Dominic Miller, Sarah Gadon,
CLASSIFICATION: 13 HV
RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes
RATING: 2 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
EVERY GENERATION gets the vampires we deserve. Me, I got Francis Ford Coppola doing Bram Stoker’s Dracula on the big screen and Angel versus Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV.
It was oodles and oodles and buckets of blood with a heavily Gothic bent, plus a feminist revision of the hero vampire slayer.
What came after that? Sparkly Diamond Man in Twilight and Vampire Diaries. Sorry Millenials, they may look good, glowering at the screen with heavy-lidded green eyes, but those were some wimpy vampires you had to contend with.
So now we get Dracula Untold, which is the story of how Vlad Tepes turned into Vlad the Impaler and came to be known as the blood-sucking fiend who goes bump in the night in search of a comely neck.
The idea is sound, but the execution is just so cheesy and surprisingly bloodless that calling it an emmentaler would be aiming high.
Basically, we get Vlad Tepes, the 15th-century leader of Wallachia, trying to protect his fiefdom from the invading Turks, aka the Ottoman Empire.
Refusing to give up his son as a hostage to the invaders, he travels to Broken Tooth Mountain to make a deal with the devil lurking in the deep – Lord Tyrion… or rather Charles Dance, hiding behind some extensive make-up – for the power to repel the invaders.
In return for drinking the monster’s blood (apparently it is Caligula, but you don’t get that titbit from the film) he gets power but at a price – he wants to drink human blood and the thirst only gets worse.
Luke Evans can act, so they could have given him a bit more meat to work with. The idea of a man who wants to protect his people by turning into a monster who deals in extreme violence makes for an interesting moral dilemma. The very act means he is giving up his humanity, but it is the most human of traits to want to protect your family – plus the set-up could have been played out totally straight, without injecting the fantasy element of bloodsucking fiend and it could have worked.
The dichotomy to the very idea can split even the strongest person apart, but alas and alack, Evans gets clumsy lines and plays it rather tediously noble.
Thank you for that totally gratuitous scene of a shirtless Evans. Appreciate that. But, why did that get stuck in there? There are several of these non sequitur moments – Domenic Miller hides behind some ornate armour and kohl-rimmed eyes, while there are several characters standing around Vlad who could have some interesting backstories. The variety of accents suggest so – but that is never used.
This could have been a contender in the vampire stakes. Instead, it is a surprisingly bloodless effort, both in terms of physical spurting, pumping blood and in the sense of a bit of oomph.
The special effect with the bats is lovely to behold, especially in the second half of the film when he’s got the hang of moving about, but this film feels more influenced by recent superhero movies (like the sequence when he discovers his powers. Or when he single-handedly strides off to save the day and quips a throwaway one-liner. Really?)
It is not a horror filled with a doomed sense of romanticism, nor is it a super-amazing action film filled with derring-do of the icky kind. Nor is it even super-scary. It is all flashy looks and cool memes and breathy anticipation of… not much.
So yes. Exactly like every other excuse for merchandising hitting the big screen at the moment.
Squeaky bat toy for your keyring, anyone?
If you liked Godzilla or Pacific Rim, you will like this.