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Dracula Untold

(2014)

(SPOILERS) It isn’t as if Dracula origins stories are anything new, or making him sympathetic come to that. Coppola went there in the prologue to his half-interesting, half-cocked Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992. Now, though, with franchise heaven and hell beckoning rich rewards to those who get it right, here’s a full-blown hero yarn, in which Dracula/Vlad the Impaler is a righteous, noble and well intentioned if not-quite-good guy, not dead and loving it until towards the end. Dracula Untold is a sloppy mess, suggesting Universal’s rebirthing of its classic monsters will run aground in much the same way hopes of Van Helsing kicking off a new round of Universal monster movies floundered more than a decade ago.

Universal isn’t alone in trying to get on a bandwagon of classic properties/characters only Disney/Marvel seem to have wholly mastered. Certainly, Warner Bros is floundering with DC, and Paramount got stuck with Star Trek, and Sony had to call in those who knew how with Spider-Man. It doesn’t look like a good sign that those who helped run Trek aground (Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci) are signed up to unleash the new Universal classic monsters powerhouse. The Mummy (last seen 2008), Van Helsing (2004) and The Wolf Man (botched in 2010) are in the offing. Kurtzam was attached as The Mummy as director last time anyone checked. Whether Universal rethinks this in the light of Orci being dumped of Star Trek III is as yet unclear, but Kurtzman does at least have one feature credit to his name. Which is one more than Orci.

Dracula Untold happened before all this planning, but its ending fastidiously ticks off the sequel options. It’s doubtful anyone will be pursuing them as no one much cared for the result (although it was medium budget, so anything’s possible; Luke Evans’ stock as a leading man is likely limited, however). Commercials director and first timer Gary Shore does no better or worse a job than others churning out similarly identikit dour colour-washed fantasies but (say) Robert Stromberg made a lot of money for Disney with Maleficent.

The main culprits here are script writing duo Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (his real name), who have somehow lined up further dubious fantasies with Vin Diesel (The Last Witch Hunter) and Alex Proyas (Gods of Egypt; Proyas was originally attached to Dracula Untold when it was Dracula Year Zero and Sam Worthington was going to star – yes, it could have been worse). On this evidence, they’re story-fashioning skills are basic at best. They redefine Vlad as the victim, characterised through a wimpy voiceover from his son (Art Parkinson, alias Rickon Stark; not the last Game of Thrones alumni pilfered here). Villainous Turks take Dracula as hostage as a wee lad, raising him as their own. Under their instruction, he commits unspeakable acts (hence the impaling epithet) but wished he hadn’t and absolutely doesn’t want his own son to be carted off in turn.

To this end Vlad comes up with scheme that is, by any standards, hopeless. The Turks, led by Dominic Cooper, surprisingly, and various other actors who don’t seem remotely Turkish (most notably Thor Kristanjsson) intend to wreak bloody destruction across fair Transylvania, so Vlad fetches himself off to Broken Tooth Mountain where he drinks the blood of vampire Charles Dance (Game of Thrones; Paul Kaye also pops up). Dance is great, and lends a bit of conviction to otherwise puerile writing. Vlad must resist blood for three days or he’ll go full vamp, and of course we know it won’t end well.

Sure, Vlad’s desperate, but he clearly hasn’t thought this out. For a start, he can’t do much in the way of Turk toppling during the daylight hours so his fighting style is seriously cramped (the rules here seem very flexible, since he’s getting burned through an open tent one moment and the next he’s standing outside in daylight, but that’s the least of the problems). Oh, except at the end, when he controls the weather and makes it really cloudy. Couldn’t he have done that before, rather than wasting entire days? More than that, we see him wipe out an entire army when he first gets vamped up, but then he goes on the run with his people. Shouldn’t he be taking the fight to them? It’s no use moaning about his time almost being up if he’s failed to take advantage of it.

Frankly, all the losses that befall his people, and his dear missus (Sarah Gaddon), are his fault. He only has himself to blame. Oh, that must be why he’s such a tragic figure. Evans is okay, but doesn’t have much to work with. Nor does Cooper, who is reduced to throwing silver coins at his foe in a tepid attempt to defeat him. After Vlad turning into a swarm of bats and generally acting like an ultra-moody version of Neo/Man of Steel, it’s a stretch that such an obstacle would even momentarily unstick him.

The full-vamp effects aren’t especially dazzling, although the vampire “predator-vision” is okay and there are worthy vampire destruction moments towards the end. Vlad manages not to get killed in daylight again here, unlike his not-so-comrades (he’s a different kind of vampire altogether; he’s got soul). Dracula Untold managed to get a PG-13 in the US despite someone’s arms being chopped off, which is nice. I expect the MPAA decided it was fine, as the was only Turkish.

Sazama and Sharpless’ tin ear for dialogue will be fun to hear coming from Vin Diesel in a few months time, and lines like “My fellow Transylvanians” and “Let the games begin” (coming from Dance), and subtitles helpfully informing us “Castle Dracula” suggest they have an uncommonly terrible touch. As for the ending, with Dracula wandering modern New York like Connor MacLeod in need of sunblock (with both Gaddon as Mina Harker and Dance resurfacing), they clearly had in mind a series with an all-heroic Dracula battling really bad dudes, so it will be all for the best if has been stopped in its tracks.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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