Post by Andrew on May 12, 2004 1:27:40 GMT -5
The movie Van Helsing can be summed up in three letters – MEH …<br>
The special effects were very cool, especially with the Wolfman, Dracula’s Brides, and Frankenstein’s monster. Dracula, well, he wasn’t the best Dracula to hit the screen. Another thing I liked is how they set off to somehow work all these monsters together in one story. And in some ways they accomplished that.
However, the downfall of this movie is a doozy of a one. Allot of this movie is your standard by-the-books popcorn movie rubbish. Stuff like the gratuitous kiss between characters, the corny jokes that would otherwise need a laugh track, a loud soundtrack that wants to be like Carl Orff, things exploding, and unimaginative ways to set stuff up (“We’re going to fight vampires? Well I’ll bring along this device that shines like the sun, but I don’t know HOW or WHY I could use it!”). I also felt it had way to many sequences of characters walking in the dark looking for something that was hunting them down. Yeah Hollywood, we already know around the corner there’s not going to be anything … until the character turns around. We’ve seen that a million times already, we’re tired of you trying to get us to fall for that.
So sadly, the bad outweighs the good. I liked it in the same I liked The Matrix: Revolutions, though. I filled in all the enormous plot holes and made a better movie in my mind! But really, I like movies that do something I don’t expect. Not some “Wow, that mysterious thing you gave me turned out to be a piece of the puzzle” stuff we saw coming a mile away. Still, it’ll be a good view for you if you like seeing computer animated monsters fighting. Because those make sure it wasn't a total waste. Just don’t expect the reasons they’re fighting to make perfect sense.
The special effects were very cool, especially with the Wolfman, Dracula’s Brides, and Frankenstein’s monster. Dracula, well, he wasn’t the best Dracula to hit the screen. Another thing I liked is how they set off to somehow work all these monsters together in one story. And in some ways they accomplished that.
However, the downfall of this movie is a doozy of a one. Allot of this movie is your standard by-the-books popcorn movie rubbish. Stuff like the gratuitous kiss between characters, the corny jokes that would otherwise need a laugh track, a loud soundtrack that wants to be like Carl Orff, things exploding, and unimaginative ways to set stuff up (“We’re going to fight vampires? Well I’ll bring along this device that shines like the sun, but I don’t know HOW or WHY I could use it!”). I also felt it had way to many sequences of characters walking in the dark looking for something that was hunting them down. Yeah Hollywood, we already know around the corner there’s not going to be anything … until the character turns around. We’ve seen that a million times already, we’re tired of you trying to get us to fall for that.
So sadly, the bad outweighs the good. I liked it in the same I liked The Matrix: Revolutions, though. I filled in all the enormous plot holes and made a better movie in my mind! But really, I like movies that do something I don’t expect. Not some “Wow, that mysterious thing you gave me turned out to be a piece of the puzzle” stuff we saw coming a mile away. Still, it’ll be a good view for you if you like seeing computer animated monsters fighting. Because those make sure it wasn't a total waste. Just don’t expect the reasons they’re fighting to make perfect sense.