ARCHIVE: sucks, dude
I woke up to a text from a friend letting me know that Radu Jude's latest film, Dracula, opens at the end of October. I admire Jude's films – his exuberantly long titles alone make me pretty happy: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn; I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians; Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – and I'm looking forward to this new one. Now we look backward. I wrote the following review for a site that no longer exists.
DRACULA UNTOLD (2014)
Dracula (Luke Evans), as it happens, is misunderstood. In fact, according to Dracula Untold, he isn’t merely inspired by the legendary Vlad The Impaler, he is Vlad The Impaler. When the Turks invade Transylvania, Vlad has a cave encounter with a creepy, fanged, undead ghoul (Charles Dance) and it transforms him into an all-powerful Dark Knight of righteous vengeance, a warrior able to take on entire armies by himself. Not that he enjoys it. This likable Drac has moral problems with his newfound blood-thirst and death powers. His wife (Sarah Gadon) even spells it out, calling him “endearing," an adjective never before thrown in this character's direction.
As portrayed by Evans in what amounts to a tedious origin story, the Dracula who haunts your darkest sex nightmares is actually a justice-minded prince who wants to stay close to home, live in peace with his kingdom and its subjects, be endearing for his wife and tuck his son into bed every night. He’s a nobleman who, when backed into a corner, resorts to dark magic and prays for forgiveness the entire time. He is history’s least interesting Dracula and he’s fine with that.
When the invading Turks arrive, led by a leering, hilarious, metal-plated Dominic Cooper (“I am owed one thousand boys!” he shouts, needing war-slaves to restock his dead troop reserves), the digital battle is on. Clean-cut swordings, off-camera beheadings, fight scenes edited by a VitaMix for the least amount of visual coherence, rule the visual field. In the middle of it all stands a lost Evans, struggling to bring something more than grim determination to a character that could stand a few years out of the public spotlight so we can all learn to miss him again.
At least it’s dark. The roiling doom-clouds are pretty to look at, the swirly bat-nado of winged minions at Dracula’s beck and call are a goofy bit of cartoon animal fury, and Evans conducts them with a combination hand-wave/voguing routine, like a very silly symphony. Meanwhile, Dance, as the monster who bestows ultimate power, is excellently gross, his super-tongue licking vampirism into one of Evans’ neck wounds, the only actor serving up the nastiness this story deserves.
This is the film that clears up Dracula's little PR problem. He's sustainable now, only destroying people who deserve it, doing his most deadly Dracula-ing in the name of justice and deceny. Unless another story comes along to give him back his sexy bad name, this is how it ends for the lustful, predatory, blackened Count, with an apologetic and bloodless whimper.
