You have returned. No one has ever returned.

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.

Comments

No matter how innocent you are, or how hard you try, they’ll find you guilty.

The Wrong Man (1956) (SPOILERS) I hate to say it, but old Truffaut called it right on this one. More often than not showing obeisance to the might of Hitchcock during his career-spanning interview, the French critic turned director was surprisingly blunt when it came to The Wrong Man . He told Hitch “ your style, which has found its perfection in the fiction area, happens to be in total conflict with the aesthetics of the documentary and that contradiction is apparent throughout the picture ”. There’s also another, connected issue with this, one Hitch acknowledged: too much fidelity to the true story upon which the film is based.

How would Horatio Alger have handled this situation?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) (SPOILERS) Gilliam’s last great movie – The Zero Theorem (2013) is definitely underrated, but I don’t think it’s that underrated – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could easily have been too much. At times it is, but in such instances, intentionally so. The combination of a visual stylist and Hunter S Thompson’s embellished, propulsive turn of phrase turns out, for the most part, to be a cosmically aligned affair, embracing the anarchic abandon of Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo’s Las Vegas debauch while contriving to pull back at crucial junctures in order to engender a perspective on all this hedonism. Would Alex Cox, who exited stage left, making way for the Python, have produced something interesting? I suspect, ironically, he would have diluted Thompson in favour of whatever commentary preoccupied him at the time (indeed, Johnny Depp said as much: “ Cox had this great material to work with and he took it and he added his own stuff to it ”). Plus

He’s so persistent! He always gets his man.

Speed (1994) (SPOILERS) It must have been a couple of decades since I last viewed Speed all the way through, so it’s pleasing to confirm that it holds up. Sure, Jan de Bont’s debut as a director can’t compete with the work of John McTiernan, for whom he acted as cinematographer and who recommended de Bont when he passed on the picture, but he nevertheless does a more than competent work. Which makes his later turkeys all the more tragic. And Keanu and Sandra Bullock display the kind of effortless chemistry you can’t put a price tag on. And then there’s Dennis Hopper, having a great old sober-but-still-looning time.

But everything is wonderful. We are in Paris.

Cold War (2018) (SPOILERS) Pawel Pawlikowski’s elliptical tale – you can’t discuss Cold War without saying “elliptical” at least once – of frustrated love charts a course that almost seems to be a caricature of a certain brand of self-congratulatorily tragic European cinema. It was, it seems “ loosely inspired ” by his parents (I suspect I see where the looseness comes in), but there’s a sense of calculation to the progression of this love story against an inescapable political backdrop that rather diminishes it.

To survive a war, you gotta become war.

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) (SPOILERS?) I’d like to say it’s mystifying that a film so bereft of merit as Rambo: First Blood Part II could have finished up the second biggest hit of 1985. It wouldn’t be as bad if it was, at minimum, a solid action movie, rather than an interminable bore. But the movie struck a chord somewhere, somehow. As much as the most successful picture of that year, Back to the Future , could be seen to suggest moviegoers do actually have really good taste, Rambo rather sends a message about how extensively regressive themes were embedding themselves in Reaganite, conservative ‘80s cinema (to be fair, this is something one can also read into Back to the Future ), be those ones of ill-conceived nostalgia or simple-minded jingoism, notional superiority and might. The difference between Stallone and Arnie movies starts right here; self-awareness. Audiences may have watched R ambo in the same way they would a Schwarzenegger picture, but I’m

One final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be free of the past.

Vertigo (1958) (SPOILERS) I’ll readily admit my Hitchcock tastes broadly tend to reflect the “consensus”, but Vertigo is one where I break ranks. To a degree. Not that I think it’s in any way a bad film, but I respect it rather than truly rate it. Certainly, I can’t get on board with Sight & Sound enthroning it as the best film ever made (in its 2012’s critics poll). That said, from a technical point of view, it is probably Hitch’s peak moment. And in that regard, certainly counts as one of his few colour pictures that can be placed alongside his black and white ones. It’s also clearly a personal undertaking, a medley of his voyeuristic obsessions (based on D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac).

What do they do, sing madrigals?

The Singing Detective (2003) Icon’s remake of the 1986 BBC serial, from a screenplay by Dennis Potter himself. The Singing Detective fares less well than Icon’s later adaptation of Edge of Darkness , even though it’s probably more faithful to Potter’s original. Perhaps the fault lies in the compression of six episodes into a feature running a quarter of that time, but the noir fantasy and childhood flashbacks fail to engage, and if the hospital reality scans better, it too suffers eventually.

The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.

Hustlers (2019) (SPOILERS) Sold as a female Goodfellas – to the extent that the producers had Scorsese in mind – this strippers-and-crime tale is actually a big, glossy puff piece, closer to Todd Phillips as fashioned by Lorene Scarfia. There are some attractive performances in Hustlers, notably from Constance Wu, but for all its “progressive” women work male objectification to their advantage posturing, it’s incredibly traditional and conservative deep down.

You were a few blocks away? What’d you see it with, a telescope?

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) (SPOILERS) John Carpenter’s first serial-killer screenplay to get made, The Eyes of Laura Mars came out nearly three months before Halloween. You know, the movie that made the director’s name. And then some. He wasn’t best pleased with the results of The Eyes of Laura Mars, which ended up co-credited to David Zelag Goodman ( Straw Dogs , Logan’s Run ) as part of an attempt by producer Jon Peters to manufacture a star vehicle for then-belle Barbra Streisand: “ The original script was very good, I thought. But it got shat upon ”. Which isn’t sour grapes on Carpenter’s part. The finished movie bears ready evidence of such tampering, not least in the reveal of the killer (different in Carpenter’s conception). Its best features are the so-uncleanly-you-can-taste-it 70s New York milieu and the guest cast, but even as an early example of the sub-genre, it’s burdened by all the failings inherit with this kind of fare.

He is a brigand and a lout. Pay him no serious mention.

The Wind and the Lion (1975) (SPOILERS) John Milius called his second feature a boy’s-own adventure, on the basis of the not-so-terrified responses of one of those kidnapped by Sean Connery’s Arab Raisuli. Really, he could have been referring to himself, in all his cigar-chomping, gun-toting reactionary glory, dreaming of the days of real heroes. The Wind and the Lion rather had its thunder stolen by Jaws on release, and it’s easy to see why. As polished as the picture is, and simultaneously broad-stroke and self-aware in its politics, it’s very definitely a throwback to the pictures of yesteryear. Only without the finger-on-the-pulse contemporaneity of execution that would make Spielberg and Lucas’ genre dives so memorable in a few short years’ time.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog