Van Helsing (2004)

There's a moment in Van Helsing where Hugh Jackman swings on a rope through a crumbling castle, fires a crossbow one-handed, lands in a crouch, and delivers a one-liner, all while the screen fills with enough digital fog to blot out Transylvania entirely. And I'll be honest with you: for about thirty seconds, I was absolutely on board. Then the CGI werewolf showed up and looked like it had escaped from a PlayStation 2 cutscene, and I remembered exactly what kind of film I was watching.

Van Helsing wants to be everything at once. It's pitching itself somewhere between The Mummy and Blade, with a generous helping of Frankenstein thrown in for good measure. Monster hunter working for the Vatican, blessed weapons, Dracula's castle, werewolves, Mr. Hyde bursting through the streets of Paris. The premise is genuinely fun, the kind of daft, maximalist concept that should make for brilliant popcorn viewing. And director Stephen Sommers, who'd already done this sort of thing with The Mummy, clearly knows how to pile spectacle on spectacle. The problem is that spectacle, piled high enough, stops being exciting and starts feeling exhausting.

Hugh Jackman does what Hugh Jackman does. He's charismatic, he's physical, he commits fully to a role that doesn't really deserve that commitment, and you're glad he's there. Watching him here, you can see why he was already making waves as Wolverine around the same time. He carries genuine screen presence even when the material around him is wobbling. Kate Beckinsale as Anna Valerious is given swords, a corset, and very little else. She's game for it, but the script treats her as decoration with fight choreography rather than a proper character. There's a lot of that going around.

The CGI is where Van Helsing really dates itself, and badly. Whole sequences look weightless and unreal, like the effects budget got stretched so thin you can see through it. When the action should be thundering, it floats. When it should feel dangerous, it looks plastic. Films from this era can sometimes get away with dodgy effects if the practical work is strong enough to anchor things. Here, so much is rendered digitally that there's nothing solid to hold onto. Early-2000s blockbuster excess is a very specific flavour, and Van Helsing is basically the house blend.

The tone is all over the place too. One scene it's reaching for gothic horror atmosphere, shadows and candlelight and genuine dread, and the next it's doing slapstick pratfalls and winking at the camera. I don't mind camp. Camp done with conviction is a legitimate art form. But this keeps hedging its bets, never fully committing to being scary or to being funny, and landing somewhere in the middle that's neither.

And yet. And yet I didn't switch it off. There's a certain guilty-pleasure energy to the whole ridiculous enterprise that I can't quite bring myself to fully condemn. When you're in the right mood, watching Jackman throw himself through two hours of monsters and mayhem is harmless enough. It knows it's daft. It revels in the daftness. I just wish it had the courage to either lean harder into the horror or lean harder into the fun, rather than trying to do both and achieving something closer to neither.

It's corny, it's flashy, and it's largely forgettable once the credits roll. A relic of a particular moment in blockbuster filmmaking when more always meant better, and when CGI felt like a magic trick that hadn't worn thin yet. It has. But Van Helsing isn't boring, and occasionally, in its more gleefully silly moments, it's genuinely entertaining in that very specific "turn your brain completely off and accept the chaos" kind of way.

Two and a half stars. Not good. Not boring either. Sometimes that's enough for a Saturday night.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2004  | Watched: 2025-09-29

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