Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

How sad is this?

Great Film overall

Love it or hate it. Take it or leave it. It's one of those movies; it wears it's purpose on it's sleeve. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out what that purpose means to Stephen Sommers. This film comes off the success of his rendition of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, equally hammy in its vision and scope. It's too bad this film was a flop at the box office. Who knows what else he had in store for us.

Ever since Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., and Boris Karloff graced the silver screen, audiences have loved to be scared of mythical monsters such as Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein respectively. Van Helsing is a great throwback to the campiness of those film yet it fails to capture the fear those films instilled in their audience. I will admit that I am biased towards this film because of its subject material and due to its sporting of Hugh Jackman as the legendary vampire hunter Van Helsing. When Universal Studios attempted to start their Dark Universe first with Dracula: Untold and then The Mummy, they failed miserably because both films simply took themselves too seriously while still not calling themselves horror. Van Helsing doesn't sport this problem and is a better movie because of it. My two biggest issues with the film is that at times it feels disjointed as though it is trying to fit too much into the story and the CGI is very spotty, sometimes appearing to be decent for the time and others making it obvious where they spent their special effects budget. Hugh Jackman does a decent job of acting however this was apparently before he got his accent under control. Kate Beckinsale does the best job out of everyone in the film, showing off her emotional range as an actress as well as her skills with an accent. Dracula, played by Richard Roxburgh, is a passable interpretation of the infamous Count, however he is never scary through the entirety of the film. Dracula's three brides are all very over the top with their acting and more annoying then anything, as is the over-the-top performance of Shuler Hensley as Frankenstein's Monster. Rounding out the case is Friar Carl, played by David Wenham, who's main purpose is for comedic relief and story exposition. This movie is by no mean's a good movie, hence my two and a half star rating, however despite its faults it is a fun film for any occasion with a nostalgic callback to some of my favorite monster movies.

Fun fact: the basic telephone was invented before the events in this film. This led us all to believe Hugh Jackman could have easily phoned his performance in, in-between Wolverine performances. Annnd he did.Please ignore the terrible CGI. And yeah, it's probably the worst you'll ever see. (Why oh why didn't they make this animated????!) The movie, unlike many films, actually gets progressively better.I grew up on "monster movies." In my household, it had to be as G-rated as possible, like the 1930's Universal monsters to the 50s-70s Godzilla films. So, it was kinda nice to rekindle with many of the bigger name Universal monsters here. With the help of a comedic-sidekick, I could make it through to the end.The Film's Title has a past he can't remember and believably, it doesn't really matter. He's just out to rid the Earth of baddies. Apparently, he's never been sent up against the original horror villain, Dracula, so let's make this movie. Oh, and he'll need Underworld, the horror version of Q and Young Frankenstein's clone to take on Bram Stoker's sorta creation of destruction. Honestly, this is good for kids. Really, really young ones. Older ones would scoff at the terrible graphics. It's not a bad movie, per se, it's just so horribly drawn due to the fifty cents spent on the special effects. Too bad...because they're laughably bad and distracting. The movie's harmless, really. It's not superior, but everyone's, well, HEART is in the right place. ***Final thoughts: A friend recommended this to me. I instantly complained on how bad the CGI was on the Werewolves. Literally, I have not seen this movie since theatres 14 years ago and that's all l I could recount. Well, that and that I thought it was just okay. Watching it for only the second time in nearly a decade and a half, I realized, it's not THAT bad of a film and there were FAR WORSE CGI shots than just the werewolf scenes. Oh, and it's more than two hours. Far too long!

In light of Universal's lukewarm attempt at kicking start their planned Dark Universe earlier this summer with the underwhelming The Mummy reboot, I was suddenly reminded of Van Helsing, the supposed big budget summer season starter of 2004 for which the studio must have carried similar hopes, but ended up way short.With the Mummy reboot, one could lay blame chiefly on the chaotic script which was beyond salvageable, not to mention Mr. Cruise himself allegedly spent months in the editing room after principal shooting. Cruise also brought his long time collaborator, Mission:Impossible writer/director Christopher McQuarrie to help with the script during development. Yet with a script like that, there was not much veteran playwright but first time blockbuster director Kurtzmann could do. With Van Helsing, it becomes harder to throw blames around.Do you blame the incoherent and totally predictable mess of a plot to the badly written script? I suppose you could. Do you blame the million or so clichés and bad dialogue on the script, too? I suppose you could. Do you blame the absolutely horrible, laughably bad fake Eastern European accents uttered by Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxborough (just about the least menacing or scary villain they could have come up with), and David Wenham (whose sidekick character is the antithesis of funny) and over the top dramatic acting on the director? Again, I suppose you could. Since the film is written and directed by the same person, riding on the success of the two Mummy films, I guess that means you can just blame him then?Yes and no. Universal's decision to put so many of their classic monsters into one popcorn summer movie with no clue whether it is supposed to be a horror, or fun action-adventure so it ended up being neither is also part of the problem, and a major part at that. The idea of making several solo origin movies first, and if these were successful, then make an ensemble tentpole obviously wasn't so hot back in 2004. Would the film have done differently if it were to come out 10 years later, under a director director? I doubt that too, seeing how The Mummy 3, The Wolfman, Dracula Untold and finally Tom Cruise's The Mummy turned out. It's totally understandable for Universal to be obsessed with their classic horror monster IPs, in the same way WB never seem to be able to let go of the classic folk legend IPs such as Pan/Jack the Giant Slayer/King Arthor that have caused them mostly flops. I'm sorry to say this, but Universal genuinely seem clueless at developing their horror monster IPs, ever since The Mummy returns 16 years ago.Credit where it's due, the production value is excellent, which is to be expected given the large budget spent on making this film. The big CGI hallway sequences is no faker than The Matrix Revolution in late 2003, the female vampires are a bit awkward through my polished 2017 glasses, but other than that, the technical department have done their jobs superbly. There really isn't much that haven't been said about why the film's bad, on the other hand. The 'horror' aspect consist of only jump scares and very little else, and even Jackman's title character, the only one in the story not terribly underwritten, seems to lack in any kind of flavor so even Dr. Van Helsing becomes a bland and generic hero, one without an origin sub-plot or even a character arc. Where is the crisis for him, what is at stake here on the most personal level? The end of the world if Dracula is not stopped? I'm sorry but that's not good enough. Even the romance subplot feels forced.(Not to mention this film started Jackman's unfortunate "holding my dead love interest in my arms while howling and sobbing in great pain, and doing all this topless" roles which was repeated 2 years later in X Men: The Last Stand.)Ironically, Alan Silvestri's soundtrack proved to have enjoyed a far better shelf life than the film itself. Song's from the score was used all over TV, includin multiple times during the peak years of the world's most popular car show, Top Gear. Hearing the Van Helsing soundtrack while watching super cars race through southern Europe is pretty funny.I agree with the 5-7 star reviews saying Van Helsing is great, mindless silly fun, I do. When the title Universal logo turns black and white and morphs into a burning torch, I was epically excited in my seat, expecting a truly scary film with a grander story than the Mummy films. Needless to say, I was immensely disappointed. I don't give out 8-10 scores easily, and 5-7 is my usual mark for a passable product, hence the score of 4 here, indicating disappointment.