It's good, no?: May 2004 Archives

One of my brothers is down visiting for the weekend, so I laid all of London bare before him and asked him to take his pick of all the entertainments on offer. From some of the finest theatre, opera, and ballet companies this land has to offer, to the artiest of art house cinemas.

So we went to see Van Helsing.

I didn't know much about the film going in, save that it was a Stephen Sommers film. This I knew because I'd seen the trailer, which positively screamed Stephen Sommers at me (not necessarily in a good way) - he's a distinctive film maker, that much I'll say about him. He's also the gent responsible for The Mummy, a film I'd actually rather enjoyed. It was loud, brash and suffered from some lapses in logic that would have been unforgivable, save for the fact that the film was so endearingly good natured, you couldn't help but smile, and be carried along in the wake of it's absurdities.

Unfortunately, since then Mr Sommers appears to have become something of a Hollywood go to guy whenever a loud, brash and illogical action film is required to fill out the summer schedules - he followed the success of The Mummy with The Mummy Returns and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. These presented ever larger spectacles, hand in hand with even greater larger lapses in logic (like taking a submarine the size of an aircraft carrier down a Venice canal. I mean, c'mon!) . And, in my estimation, they weren't quite as good natured which made their (all too obvious) flaws all that much harder to forgive.

Which brings us to Van Helsing. As you might expect, I didn't have terribly high hopes going into the cinema, but perhaps because of this I was pleasantly surprised. It still betrays the classic trademark Sommers traits of loudness, brashness and wanton nonsensicality, and I'm quite certain it won't be picking up any Oscars (outside of the technical categories at least), but it's enjoyable fare and, within the confines of it's own skewed internal logic, everything seems reasonably self-consistent (compared to The Mummy Returns and LoEG at least). It still betrays one of Sommer's greatest plotting weaknesses, namely his over-reliance on outlandish co-incidences to resolve dangling plot threads, but as with The Mummy, the whole thing trots along at such a breathlessly ludicrous pace and applies enough of a charm offensive to enable you to over look it. That said, I still can't escape the feeling that Sommers is trying to make an Indiana Jones for modern audiences. It may never happen and it certainly hasn't happened here - after all, I know Indiana Jones, and you sir, are no Indiana Jones.

I should probably mention that the effects work is of a high standard (the cgi still looks like cgi, but I consider it discourteous to complain about such things - it's good cgi after all), with possibly the best effect the film has to offer being Kate Beckinsale's corset. I mean, that was a special effect right? People in real life don't have waists that narrow surely...?