DRACULA UNTOLD – The Review

Oh, what Marvel Studios hath wrought! In 2012 their movie universe was brought together with MARVEL’S THE AVENGERS which became the number three top grossing film of all time. Leading up to that flick and in the follow-ups, characters like Nick Fury and the Black Widow bounced about from franchise to franchise along with countless dialogue references. Well, the studios that had already licensed Marvel characters are attempting the same kind of “synergy”. At Sony, Spider-Man will have spin-offs with supporting characters and even villains, like Venom and the Sinister Six. There’s even talk of the X-Men bumping into the Fantastic Four over at Fox. Finally Warners, with their DC comics’ icons, has followed Marvel’s lead by pitting Superman and Batman in 2016, setting a foundation for their own hero team, the Justice League. Now, how will Universal Studios have a shared movie universe?  Since a comic book company isn’t part of the corporate family, they delved into their own history, almost 75 years. After two big Lon Chaney silents, with the advent of “talkies” the big U established themselves as the home of classic monsters with FRANKENSTEIN and THE MUMMY. No better time than to dust off those ghouls and produce an original story that will be part of the foundation for a new monster series. But how solid is that foundation? For that we go beyond Bela Lugosi and open the crypt on DRACULA UNTOLD.

The saga begins several centuries ago as the invading Turkish army took thousands of Romanian boys and forced them to become child soldiers. Even the crown prince, Vlad Tepes was captured. When he was able to return to the throne, he led his troops and drove the Turks out. To intimidate the invaders, Tepes ordered enemy soldiers’ bodies to be skewered on high wooden poles or stakes, leading to his reputation as “Vlad the Impaler”and the name Dracula. When the helmet of a Turkish soldier is found in a stream, Vlad (Luke Evans) and two aides climb to the top of a mountain and enter a dark cave with a floor covered in bones. The two aides are snatched into the shadows by a powerful, fast-moving force. As Vlad barely escapes into the light at the mouth of the cave, the voice of the attacker boasts of his power. Vlad returns to his kingdom and joins his adoring wife Mirena (Sarah Gadon) and pre-teen son Ingeras (Art Parkinson) for the Easter celebration. The festivities are disrupted by representatives of the Turkish army. It seems that the annual silver coin tribute is not enough. They demand hundreds of their young men and boys. When they insist on taking Ingeras, Vlad takes desperate measures. Thinking the cave creature may have the power to defeat the invaders, Vlad returns to the mountain. Instead of killing Vlad, the fanged creature, the “Master Vampire” (Charles Dance) strikes a deal. Opening a vein it drips blood into a skull tip. If Vlad will drink, he will possess all of its dark powers. And if Vlad can resist the overpowering thirst for human blood, at the end of three days he will regain his humanity. If he succumbs, Vlad will remain an undead creature of the night. And so Vlad has only 72 hours to defeat the massive forces of his old Turkish commander Mehmed (Dominic Cooper).

The veteran cast valiantly battles the often campy clichéd script. Evans, recently sent in the last Hobbit installment, is left to furling his brow and screaming at his enemies. He’s a good swordsman, but really lacks the brooding dark intensity this role really demands, but the ladies should enjoy a gratuitous bare torso sequence (nice 8 pack, bro). The radiantly beautiful Gadon, fresh from BELLE and IDENTITY, has little to do as the loving, but concerned wife until she’s regulated to standard action epic damsel-in-distress. Dance makes a good bloodsucker who seems more bat than man, but after he flips the switch on the creaky plot, he’s only seen in snippets, glaring from the shadows in his mountain lair. Cooper, so terrific as Tony’s pop, Howard Stark, and Bond’s pop, Ian Fleming in a recent BBC mini-series, is just the usual snarling arch-nemisis, glaring, sneering, and almost resorting to mustache-twirling. They all deserve better material.

First time feature director Gary Shore can’t really breathe life into a script full of interchangeable supporting characters and tired old late show horror plot devices. The over-reliance on CGI becomes tiresome after constant repetition. Instead of morphing into a giant bat, Vlad will suddenly burst into dozens of the black fluttering pixels. The big battle scenes have the camera dead center of the swooping flock as it streams frantically toward the troops. This makes the action scenes almost impossible to follow with the camera jerking and jumping from one spot to the next (often resulting in throbbing headaches). Other times the editing is unnecessarily confused as the vampire POV pops in to his night vision and glowing blood targets. It doesn’t help that Vlad dons blood-red armor for his final showdown which looks to similar to Gary Oldham’s costume from the opening scenes of the vastly superior BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA from over 20 years ago. Plus the PG-13 rating renders most of the terror sequences toothless, And for further annoyance, the final pre-fade out scene teases us of perhaps a more interesting tale, one we will probably never get to explore. This jump-start to a new franchise/shared movie world is a lackluster non-starter. There must be many more interesting tales to tell of this iconic character than those related in DRACULA UNTOLD. Stake this sucker!

1.5 Out of 5