VAN HELSING

Wanted by the police and despised by ordinary people because he is considered a fierce and ruthless killer, Van Helsing is actually the secret weapon of the Church and the Vatican in the exhausting and eternal struggle against Evil. Brave, fearless, and with a dark past, Van Helsing is a Monster Hunter who travels the world in search of the Demon and all its manifestations, determined to stop the evil creatures that threaten the unsuspecting and defenseless human beings. His new mission will take him and his friend Brother Carl to cold Transylvania to help Anna Valerious, the last descendant of a noble family that has been fighting the fearsome Count Vladislaus Dracula for generations, who is determined to invade the world with his progeny of fierce vampires. Before any comment and any analysis, it is important to underline a detail immediately: "Van Helsing", although drawing heavily from the collective horror imagination, is not a horror film. Not even remotely. Nor is it the faithful reconstruction of a historical period or a character: forget therefore the gloomy and oppressive atmospheres of "Dracula" by Francis Ford Coppola or "From Hell" by the Hughes brothers. "Van Helsing" is a purely carefree action film. Period. It remains to be decided whether it is also a good action film... The new film by the funambulist Stephen Sommers (director of "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns", adrenaline-packed and ironic action movies that broke box office records around the world not many seasons ago) arrives in cinemas backed by an advertising campaign and an industrial quantity of merchandising such as to suggest a public success worthy of an announced masterpiece. And it is almost certain that the public success will not be lacking. Effectively it is impossible not to recognize in "Van Helsing" an exceptional visual impact, really out of the ordinary, achieved by exploiting a dizzying budget that allowed the director to use all the most modern digital techniques to bring to the screen a remarkable array of monsters that have populated our collective imagination for time immemorial. Space therefore for the very bad Mr. Hyde, the tormented Frankenstein, the fierce Werewolf, and the fearsome (and somewhat overused) Count Dracula, represented with a graphic dress (it is indeed the case to say so!) completely new and impressive. On the level of special effects we are indeed faced with what is most modern that the classic monsters of horror have ever been able to benefit from: to the joy of our eyes we will finally see a trio of fierce vampires flying in the sky, a Frankenstein visibly built from pieces of cadavers sewn together, as well as a series of terrifying transformations of the Werewolf and Count Dracula. If we stopped at this point, certainly "Van Helsing" would deserve the highest marks: impossible however it is to judge a film only for its aesthetic dress, unless one wants to belittle the deep soul of cinema to a pure and simple (however costly) stylistic exercise. As we have already clarified "Van Helsing" is unequivocally an action film: the rhythm and speed of the scenes indeed do not leave the spectator a moment's breath, following each other consistently throughout the duration of the film. But all this running fast, this frontal assault, this audiovisual frenzy of biblical proportions ends up very soon desensitizing the spectator, who begins to numb and unconsciously lower the threshold of attention. The next step risks paradoxically being boredom: a constant and fierce succession of spectacular and modern action scenes at the limit of the unbelievable (practically there is no physical obstacle that the protagonists cannot overcome defying all the laws of nature), inevitably ends up extinguishing the interest of the public. The plot that should tie everything together is practically non-existent, confined to a few miserable lines of script inserted by force between a pirouette and a firework: at a certain point, probably to wake us up, we are made to believe that the protagonist Van Helsing hides a secret past that he does not remember due to memory loss, and that connects him in some way to Count Dracula. In the end, we will know what connects them, but it will be a simple phrase incapable of giving us an explanation or defining a background, pronounced only to respect the rule that always welcomes a twist at the end of the film. It is a pity that instead of surprising the spectator, this revelation makes him believe that he has lost something along the way, that he has not understood the development of situations and characters that in reality never develop. Of course, even "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" did not shine for narrative complexity: both films were nevertheless built around a well-defined story, light but never nonsensical, fertile ground for the tasty mix of adventure and irony that had managed to enchant the public not a little. In the case of "Van Helsing" the lack of a real plot makes the frequent and unfortunate comic remarks of the characters vain as well, too predictable and stereotyped, too forced and detached from the context. Another sore point is the characterization of the characters, deliberately imaginary and comic-book-like, but in the end too surreal and unrealistic: the Vatican represented as a 007 government agency organized against the forces of evil, monks inventors of monster-killing machines, crossbows that machine-gun wooden stakes, rotating all-cutting blades, blinding light bombs (why is there no holy water gun?), protagonists with an uncertain modern and aggressive look. Although not at an excellent level of interpretation, it is not so much the acting of the actors that fails, but their presentation on screen: Count Dracula becomes an aristocratic snob with questionable charisma, indecently dubbed with a fake Russian from a children's game, and at times more similar to a frail Renato Zero (no offense!) than to an immortal and invincible vampire, and even the character played by Hugh Jackman does not convince, to the point that from a fallible ordinary man who faces the forces of evil with courage, Van Helsing becomes a leather-jacketed tough guy, all muscles and little brain, a kind of superhero who lacks only the tights but not certainly a strange and lethal arsenal. Aware of being in the presence of a film of pure entertainment, a slight feeling of discomfort still creeps into the spectator's mind. "Van Helsing" is at times too hectic and booming even for an action movie buff, just as it is at times too little engaging and full of pathos for a horror movie buff. It is a Sunday afternoon movie at the cinema with the whole family, a popcorn and chips movie, a noisy school group movie that giggles at every scene making noise in the room. And perhaps that is exactly the result Stephen Sommers wanted to achieve. Surely not what we would have wanted to see, we who still seek in cinema (and in horror cinema in particular) real emotions that run through our veins. We who would not trade for all the gold in the world the cold digital transformations of the Werewolf in "Van Helsing" with the shocking and unforgettable one in "An American Werewolf in London" by John Landis.