The opening scene of Van Helsing should set the tone for the rest of the film. It's a campy, tongue-in-cheek tribute to old Universal horror films, and writer-director Stephen Sommers achieves the perfect balance of humor and excitement, with cinematographer Alan Daviau shooting the sequence in lush black and white that brings to mind legendary monster-movie director James Whale (Frankenstein, 1931). The scripting even manages to bring together Count Dracula and Dr. Victor Frankenstein in a semi-plausible scenario. Too bad it's all downhill from there.
Sommers clearly knows his classic horror flicks, and his concept for Van Helsing is a strong one. After riffing on '40s adventure serials with his two Mummy movies, Sommers has thrown together three classic Universal monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man) for what should be another fun romp through classic pulp-cinema. In 1898, a year after the events of the top-notch opening sequence, we're introduced to the title character (Hugh Jackman) in Paris, hunting down Mr. Hyde in the requisite James Bond-style scene that has nothing to do with the main plot. Hyde, incidentally, looks only marginally more realistic than he did in last summer's stinker The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The monster dispatched, Van Helsing returns to Rome, where we learn he's some sort of Vatican secret agent, complete with his own version of Q, a friar named Carl (David Wenham). Van Helsing and Carl are sent off to Transylvania to deal with Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), who is trying to raise an army of offspring with the help of Frankenstein's monster (Shuler Hensley). The count also is hunting down Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), the last in a line of his foes.
The plot only gets more convoluted from there, as Sommers has to jump through plenty of hoops to give all his monsters the requisite face time. He works the most changes on Van Helsing himself, who in Bram Stoker's original Dracula novel was an older, gentlemanly professor. Jackman's Van Helsing looks more like a cowboy priest, and he totes retro-modern weapons including a machine-gun-style crossbow and a pair of spinning blades. Beckinsale's Anna is equally badass, decked out in a corset and heels while fighting evil and sporting a ridiculous Transylvanian accent. Both performers do the action thing well: Jackman with his X-Men experience and Beckinsale having encountered both werewolves and vampires in Underworld.
But Sommers doesn't do them justice, leaving behind much of the camp and sense of fun from his Mummy films and staging some murky action sequences. For a film with such a large budget, estimated to be $150 million, Van Helsing has some chintzy-looking effects, and the climax features the unfortunate trend of two CGI characters battling it out, making the experience similar to watching a video game. After the crisp black-and-white look of the opening, the film switches to color, only to bathe nearly every scene in drab shades of gray. This may make sense in the context of the story, but it is hard to watch for the film's 130-minute running time.
That two-hour-plus length also is a problem, as the plot just drags on and on, and much of Sommers' dialogue is flat. Wenham provides some good comic relief, as does Kevin J. O'Connor as the stereotypically hunchbacked Igor, but far too much of the film feels like drudgery. It's rare to find a film that actually suffers from not going far enough over the top, but that's exactly the problem with Van Helsing. As far as potential summer blockbusters go, the season will undoubtedly bring on worse, and at least Sommers has a sense of film history and is developing an interesting style. If he had trusted his old-school sensibilities more, his film would have been a much more entertaining experience.