Stop me if you heard this before.
A young prince has found his soulmate, and she dies during a brutal war. The young prince turns his back on God and somehow returns as an undead vampire 400 years later to find his soulmate yet again.
If you said 2024’s Nosferatu, you would get points, but if you said Dracula, you would be dead on.
The better question to ask, however, would be how many times are movie makers planning on telling this tale, and how can they make it better. While I can’t answer the first one, the answer to the second question is that Luc Besson, tried and while he didn’t make something memorable, it was a good effort.
The one good thing I will start with is that Besson did something that I have rarely seen in Dracula movies in that he delves deeper into Dracula’s (Caleb Landry Jones) arrival that what he is doing, he is doing out of love.
My issue, however, is that while there are dark moments to this film, there are a few comedic parts that are sprinkled throughout, and the timing at which they occur is so off-putting that it takes from the tone of the movie. For instance, there is one scene in which Dracula defines insanity itself in his dying, that I wasn’t even sure if it was supposed to be funny. We also will not talk about the new twist in the vampire story in which Dracula discovers fragrances as being key to luring his victims to their demise. We definitely will not discuss the ludicrous dance number that was performed.
The greater issue still is that we have seen this story told in better ways so many times before, and with the aforementioned Nosferatu, this movie needed many years of separation because this is the nearest comparison. One could even say that there are a few beats from 1992’s Dracula that riff into this production and at times are better done, while sometimes just as cheesy. At least you won’t see shadows throttling each other here.
For the acting, Caleb Landry Jones does fair in his depiction, even with his hammy European accent. Christopher Waltz as a vampire-hunting priest always chews up the scenery. I was disappointed that his character was unnamed. While Zoe Bleu turned in an admirable performance, was Elizabeta/Mina, I felt that Matila De Angelis’ Maria was the standout of the two women.
The movie is watchable, but doesn’t really move the needle on this story. Even with a different location and a different perspective will do little to make this movie stand out. Sometimes too silly to be take seriously, at the end it’s a nearly forgettable love story with some blood and gore splashed in between.
Final Grade: C+
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