It’s
a bit of a double-edged sword seeing Australian names in mainstream cinema:
Sometimes you get James Wan, director of The Conjuring as well as the original
Saw; and sometimes you get Baz Luhrman, director of Moulin Rouge and Australia,
among other pieces of aggravating drivel. I love seeing this great (at times) country
I live in being represented in Hollywood, but it doesn’t always yield the best
results. With today’s film, we have Stuart Beattie as writer/director who’s had
a very murky track record of late, having been a co-writer on G.I. Joe: The
Rise Of Cobra, the aforementioned Australia as well as a re-writer on Punisher:
War Zone. Let's see how well he does here.
I feel like a bit of a broken
record here, as once again I have to emphasise how bad the special effects are
in a film I’m reviewing. What makes this even worse is that, somehow, this
movie manages to top The Legend Of Hercules in terms of cheap looking computer
effects. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, looks
like it even belongs in the same cutting room as the film it’s attached to.
This isn’t just Asylum mock-buster levels of cheap; this looks like someone took
the animations out of one of those free action movie effects apps for
smartphones and used them for the effects. Even going past the computer
effects, the make-up work here is haphazard at best as well. Eckhart in no way
looks like he has been composed of miscellaneous body parts, and looks more
like he has just been in a couple of nasty fights. At the risk of invoking some
weird derivative of Godwin’s Law, this is actually less believable
than when Edward from Twilight was trying to convince people that he was a
monster. Put simply, with Eckhart, it’s even more obvious that they were trying
to sell his character, a walking corpse in essence, more as being sexy than
being scary.
If there’s one thing I can at
least give this movie, it’s that the acting is decent. Eckhart was a damn good
choice to play Frankenstein and he gives a certain gruffness that fits how the
character is written here. Nighy does well enough as Naberius, being
authoritative and threatening as his role requires, although in quite a few
scenes his natural air of danger is somewhat dampened by the bad demonic vocal
effect they put on his voice. Don’t fix what isn’t broken, guys. The rest of
the cast, like Jai Courtney (who at this point seems to naturally gravitate
towards crap movies) and Miranda Otto, do okay with their roles, but this is
where we get to the biggest problem with this movie: The acting is fine, but
it’s not enough to turn this script into anything worth watching.
While the dark urban fantasy
setting is getting more than a little overused in the last ten years or so, I
would be willing to let it slide if they gave something that could fill that
setting and make it interesting. Unfortunately, we get wildly inconsistent
characters, a prologue that seems tacked on because I’m guessing Beattie still
wasn’t sure what era to set the movie in at that stage, an extremely derivative
villain plot and various other subscriptions (continuous streams of issues). We
keep getting characters contradicting themselves, sometimes in the same scene,
mostly from the gargoyle queen Leonore and one of her soldiers Gideon, played
by Otto and Courtney respectively. Hell, even with contradictions, their
actions are usually stupid for their own reasons, not the least of which being
that the gargoyles had no idea just how close the demons’ headquarters were to
their own until they tricked into following Frankenstein to them
Not only
that, the villain’s plans for Frankenstein? It’s the plot of Van Helsing with
Hugh Jackman copied and pasted. Seriously, it is literally the same plot; just
replace ‘vampire babies’ with ‘possessed corpses’ and the plan and
Frankenstein’s role within said plan is the exact same. You know, as much as Van
Helsing gets flak with many critics, at least the writing and effects in that
weren’t nearly as bad as they are here. There’s also a romance that’s hinted at
more than a few times between Frankenstein and Terra Wade (Yvonne
Strzechowski), one of the scientists working for Naberius, but it’s just
dropped at the end of the film with a loud thud that I’m guessing was meant to
be explained in a future sequel. Given how badly this movie did at the box
office, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that ever surfacing.
All in all, this is Taliban brand
terri-bad. Sure, it may have better actors than Legend Of Hercules, but between the
incessantly horrid writing and the lazy special effects, this actually turns
out worse at the end of it all.
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