Some stories are timeless and are told through every generation. It could be Moby Dick or Sherlock Holmes; there are just some characters that defy age. One of those characters is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a story retold countless times on the big screen, with everyone from Bela Lugosi to George Hamilton playing the Prince of Darkness. It has been awhile since the blood sucker found himself on the silver screen, and before you say it, no the “Twilight” films do not count, this vampire wears black and does not sparkle.
With the story being told so often you have to find a new wrinkle to the story, and “Dracula Untold” goes back to the beginning of the story to do that. Vlad (Luke Evans) is just your everyday prince, but this prince was also the Turkish army’s most deadly weapon, even earing the nickname Vlad the Impeller. Everything is great now that he is retired, but that all changes when the Sultan Mehmed (Dominic Cooper) wants a thousand boys, including Vlad’s on son to serve in his army. Well Vlad is not having that and brings war to his people. Knowing the pending odds against him, Vlad seeks the help of a creature that lives in the mountains and makes a deal that will make him and his story immortal.
This story has been around for a long time; the problem is that it doesn’t induce fear anymore. People aren’t scared of monsters so much as they are things that go bump in the night. That doesn’t mean that there is not a place for a good Dracula movie, unfortunately this is not that movie. While the film starts off promising, it peaks in the first fifth teen minutes and takes a rapid nosedive after that. Director Gary Shore makes his feature debut, but uses cheap CGI tricks to achieve shots that only fans of Michael Bay might enjoy. He is working from a script written by Matt Sazama and Buck Sharpless, who use the Bram Stoker’s classic novel for their story. The story has potential but ends of being a story of conveniences and things that make you question what is going on. Being a fan of Universal’s Monsters, I wanted to like this movie, but this is not that guy who wanted to suck your blood, no this is the Son of The Devil” who still has some humanity in him. “Dracula Untold” could have been so much more, but what we are left with is a story that was much better not told at all.
Brian Taylor