Directed
by Gary Shore, Starring: Luke Evans, Sarah Gadon, Dominic Cooper, Charles
Dance. Fantasy/Horror, UK, 2014, 92mins, Cert 15.It is 1462, and former impaler Vlad (Luke Evans), having been enslaved by the
Ottomans as a child and brought up to be a fearsome warrior, is now a peaceful
loving ruler of his homeland Wallachia. Unfortunately, history is due to repeat
itself as his former childhood friend Mehmed is now the evil Turkish sultan and
he’s demanding 1,001 Wallachian boys to be drafted into his army (the
thousandth and one being Vlad’s own son Ingeras). Desperate to protect his son and
people he enters into a Faustian pact with the ‘Master Vampire’ (Charles Dance)
whereby he will gain the strength of one hundred men, the speed of a falling
star and the ability to hear a squirrel break wind several miles into the
distance. The small print in all this is that he will develop an insatiable
lust for human blood, and if he can’t resist this diabolical craving for three
days he will become a vampire for all eternity and free the ‘Master’ vamp from
his cave on Broken Tooth Mountain forever...
This
then is Universal Studios attempt to reboot their classic monsters by giving
the world the ‘untold’ origins story of Dracula. Unfortunately, despite
first-time director Gary Shore pulling off some visually impressive set-pieces,
it never amounts to much more than a bland, cynical, studio penned attempt to
match Marvel’s lucrative superhero factory line.
So
anxious are the makers to arrive at their modern-day envelope opening finale,
that in their unseemly haste they don’t have the time (or inclination) to show us
Vlad’s actual ‘origins’ as a child. Instead we have to make do with a throwaway
montage glossing over his childhood indoctrination into the Ottoman army, his burgeoning
into the feared impaler and his subsequent rejection of all this impaling and
his desire to settle down and become a lover (not an impaler). Whilst brevity
is often a quality to be admired, if you’re going to rip up one of the most
well-known ‘origin’ novels of gothic fiction of all-time, doing so in such a
rapid roughshod fashion is doomed to failure regardless of the merits of your
conceit.
Luke
Evans does what he can with an anaemic script, but his Vlad doesn’t stand a
chance of entering into the pantheon of iconic onscreen Dracula’s no matter how
impressive his command of the weather is or his new-found ability to transform
into a colony of bats in the blink of a CG eye. Charles Dance’s ‘Master
Vampire’ is a suitably creepy Nosferatu-like creature skulking in his
skull-laden cave with his overlong tongue, but his encounter with Evans merely
serves to remind one just how much enjoyable the tale would be if its tone was
consistently darker than IMAX grey.
It
strikes me as almost perverse that given the bloody origins of the story,
DRACULA UNTOLD attempts to deliver its undernourished tale with only the merest
hint or briefest coy smidgeon of the claret stuff. And it plays fast and loose
with Vlad’s supernatural capabilities too, surely someone who has ‘the speed of
a falling star’ could save a person from plummeting to their death down a
Cliffside...?
DRACULA
UNTOLD is an unnecessary half-told tale created solely for the purpose of
trying to inject some lifeblood into a character that really doesn’t need
rebooting. And as for the overarching aim of teeing up an X-Men (X-Monsters?) monster-mash
up franchise, well we’ve already had Fred Dekker’s wonderfully affectionate
1987 homage THE MONSTER SQUAD, so thanks, but no thanks.
**(out of 5*)
(This review was orIginally published by FrightFest.
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