Let’s face it, the title of Dracula Untold is going to inspire a lot of snide remarks. “Dracula Untold should have stayed that way,” yadda-yadda-yadda. Aren’t you clever? But the sad, honest truth is that this story probably should have been told. It just should have been told better than this.
The character of Dracula, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad Tepes, aka Bloody McFangperson has been kicking around for over a hundred years. Longer, if you consider the fact that he’s based on a real guy. He’s a haunted antihero, all-powerful yet forever imprisoned by his vulnerabilities. He can’t look himself in the mirror, literally and figuratively. But he still rules the night. He is, to put it in a rather obvious way, the original Batman.
So reimagining Dracula as a dark superhero story, with the addition of lavish period settings and battle sequences straight out of Braveheart is actually a pretty neat idea. The problem with Dracula Untold is that it’s also the only idea the filmmakers seem to have had. The movie flutters through the bullet points of Blockbuster Screenwriting 101 without sticking anything between them, like a personality, or a little bit of wit, or god forbid some interesting characters.
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Luke Evans plays Vlad Tepes, a Transylvanian prince (never mind the king, apparently) who was once a political hostage, trained to fight in the Turkish army and impale his enemies. But he has long since abandoned his warrior ways in favor of domestic bliss with his hot wife Mirena (Sarah Gadon) and boring son Ingeras (Art Parkinson). He’s totally never going to be a soldier again, you guys. Oh, and there’s a vampire in the mountain next to his castle. That’ll probably be important later.
When the Turks finally return and demand more child soldiers for their army, including Vlad’s own son, he seriously considers it. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen. But eventually he reneges on the deal and starts a war that his people cannot win. So he climbs that mountain – see? I told you that might be important – and he makes a deal with a nosferatu played by Charles Dance. Vlad will get all the powers of a vampire, and best of all, if he doesn’t drink any blood for three days he’ll even get to become human again afterwards. Because yeah… that’s going to happen.
Luke Evans strikes a handsome figure and weathers the complex motivations of Dracula as best he can, but he’s stymied by a script that doesn’t just doesn’t care as much as he does. It’s hard to play an interesting hero when everyone around you – friends, family and villains alike – is just a cypher. Dominic Cooper plays the Turkish prince and we’re told that he’s like a brother to Vlad, but you’d never know it from the way they interact. They only have two scenes together: one of them an exposition-laden coffee break, the other a ridiculous climactic fight that seems to have sprung half-formed from the boss battle in a video game.
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In fact, Dracula Untold plays a lot like a video game movie, or at least the crappy video game movies we’ve been forced to suffer through so far. The story is a copy of a copy of other, better movies; you get the gist of it but none of the nuance. So the finished product is just perfunctory plot points laid haphazardly between action sequences left over from Castlevania: Lord of Shadows. Lengthy hack-and-slashing, the occasional super powered radial attack. It looks cool enough but after a while it inspires no emotional reaction beyond glazed acceptance.
If anything, it feels like the problem with Dracula Untold is that it isn’t long enough. And isn’t that an unusual criticism? The plot is familiar but not contemptuously so, it just needed room to breathe and let the characters actually say something instead of just responding to the latest incident. The story of Dracula Untold is so broad that telling it matter-of-factly can only come across as false. It takes a strong foundation in character to keep a tower of gravitas from falling down.
Dracula Untold is a waste of a decent premise and solid cast, and although it’s not “terrible” it’s still probably the most toothless vampire movie in recent memory. At least Twilight had the strength of its convictions, however insipid they may have been. This is a callous cash-in on popular trends that just happens to have Dracula in it, a studio note that made it all the way to the big screen before anyone figured out how to do it right. What mediocre music it makes.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
