Van Helsing Review

The idea was sound. Universal owned Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's creature, and one hundred and sixty million dollars should have bought a picture in which those three could stand in the same frame with some menace intact. Stephen Sommers shoots everything at one pitch instead, so the Frankenstein prologue, the Paris rooftop chase and the werewolf transformations all arrive at identical volume and none of them registers.

The computer animation is the visible wound: Dracula's brides move like screensavers, the Mr Hyde fight has no contact between bodies, and Van Helsing swings over gaps on a rope plainly attached to nothing. Kate Beckinsale is asked to hold a Transylvanian accent for two hours that she cannot hold for two scenes, in a corset the camera is more interested in than she is.

Richard Roxburgh plays Dracula as pantomime, which could have worked in a film willing to be funny, except the script keeps stopping to insist on its hero's tormented amnesia. David Wenham gets the only genuine laughs as the friar. Alan Silvestri's score works far harder than the material. Jackman is physically committed and completely stranded, playing a man with no interior in a story that keeps announcing he has one.