Whatever You Do, Don’t Drink Blood
‘Dracula Untold,’ in Which Prince Vlad Battles the Turks
When the vampires in “Dracula Untold”
are exposed to sunlight, flakes of skin fly from their faces; the
special effect resembles a cross between action painting and dandruff.
The movie is the latest multiplex filler to co-opt a classic tale only
to drown it in computer-generated murk. Even the title has the ring of
something created by committee.
This
brisk origin story could be worse. It recasts Bram Stoker’s count as an
antihero in the mold of Christopher Nolan’s Batman. Prince Vlad (Luke
Evans), raised as a child soldier enslaved to the Turks, has promised
his wife (Sarah Gadon) that their son (Art Parkinson) won’t suffer the
same fate.
When the Turkish sultan Mehmed (Dominic Cooper) orders mass conscription, Vlad does what any regent would do: He asks a vampire (Charles Dance)
for superpowers. In the greatest bargain in the history of the undead,
Vlad will become a vampire for three days and then turn human again, as
long as he doesn’t drink blood in the meantime.Counting those days is tricky; the sun seems to rise and set whenever
it’s dramatically convenient. This Dracula even controls cloud patterns,
shutting out the light as necessary. Looking for plausibility in a
movie called “Dracula Untold”
is as pointless as looking for humor or personality in Mr. Evans’s dour
performance. But in a sea of gray, squinting is only natural.
No comments:
Post a Comment