Look! There on the ground! Its a bat! Its a sullen schmuck! Its Dracula-Man!
  • Look! There on the ground! It's a bat! It's a sullen schmuck! It's Dracula-Man!

Dracula Untold is not a horror movie. It's not even a monster movie. It's a superhero movie. Its formula is ripped off from a thousand other superhero movies, superimposed roughly over the Dracula backstory. This is, as you probably guessed, an awkward fit. The filmmakers strain mightily to fit the formula by making Vlad the Impaler into a nice guy, a good-hearted prince of Transylvania who, sure, has his flaws—the opening reminds us that he impaled, like, a lot of people in the past—but who mostly just wants what's best for his people, his wife, and his son. But when evil Turks invade his empire he has to make a deal with dark forces to save everyone. Cue the origin story, get ready for the special effects, and prepare yourself for the unwanted prequel to one of the most-retold stories in cinematic history.

Our story opens in 1400s Transylvania, also known as The Land of Dodgy Accents; every actor hails from a different region, apparently, from Faux Russia to British California to Ensign Chekov. The people are toasting Vlad (Luke Evans, perfectly fine) for giving Transylvania ten solid years of peace and prosperity when Mehmed, the sultan of the Turks demands that one thousand Transylvanian boys join his army. Mehmed is played by Dominic Cooper, who is one of the few bright lights in the film. Cooper's ridiculous accent and gaudy golden armor are just over-the-top enough to charm audiences; it's too bad he's barely in the movie, basically serving as a glorified cameo. Weird dialogue like this happens:

Mehmed: "Speaking of which, I am owed one thousand boys."

Vlad: "I'm worth a thousand boys, and you know it!"

We're also treated to the forehead-slapping pronouncement that "sometimes the word doesn't need another hero. Sometimes what it needs [dramatic pause] is a monster." But before you go thinking Dracula Untold is a so-bad-it's-good delight, I need to tell you about all the muddled visuals. The special effects look like a child went crazy with brown fingerpaints, obscuring all the action that director Gary Shore didn't already hack to pieces with clumsy camerawork. Maybe the brain-dead stylishness of a Zack Snyder and a more lavish production design budget could've saved this movie, but the cheapness oozes in from all corners of the screen.

So let's do the math: we've got too much backstory, a bad case of prequelitis, formulaic superhero tropes, and a clear intent to turn this movie into the first outing of a new Dracula franchise. Yeah. Corporate filmmaking doesn't get any more blatant, or more hollow, than this.