Monster action film Van Helsing may be the ultimate pastiche movie. Not only does it borrow liberally from a thousand other movies, it is also largely made up of computer-generated imagery or CGI, meaning that, at the most fundamental level, practically every shot is patched together.
Van Helsing starts where the first, great Frankenstein ends — with the torch-bearing peasants besieging Dr F in his castle. In other words, it starts with a climax. A prelude climax, as it were. Then, barely has it switched from black and white to dark, moody colour than there’s a big confrontation between hero and monster — the kind of thing a Spider-Man or Batman would end with. Another climax.
And so on. Like the Indiana Jones movies, Van Helsing is non-stop action, with barely a pause for thought, though director Stephen Sommers does build in the welcome humour that characterised his Mummy hits. Unlike those highly enjoyable films, though, here Sommers (who also scripted) can’t achieve the same easy-going wit and self-conscious irony. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t got Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz to do the wisecracks; Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing is jaw-clenchingly stolid by comparison, and Kate Beckinsale as his fellow vampire-hunter is fatally burdened with a Transylvanian accent.
Unlike previous avatars such as Peter Cushing and Laurence Olivier, this Van Helsing has a Seventies rock-star hairdo, an Indiana Jones hat and a Matrix coat; he has retro-futuristic weapons from Wild Wild West. Except for some vague mumbo-jumbo about a distant past (here comes the prequel-sequel), he exists only to hunt monsters from the history of horror cinema — werewolves, the Frankenstein monster, Mr Hyde … In particular, there’s arch-villain Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), who has a lot of baby vampires in pods from the Alien movies or the last version of Godzilla, which he wants to hatch by using the late Dr Frankenstein’s revolutionary electro-chemical methods.
All this stuff from the great deep freeze of pop culture mythology is microwaved and whizzed up in comic-book style, where people can be thrown great distances, bounce off or crash through several walls, and survive with barely a scratch. The very plot has been made in a blender.
The central, rather blank hero, Van Helsing himself, directly echoes Jackman’s turn as Wolverine in the X-Men films, with a bit of Tarzan thrown in. He’s also a 19th-century James Bond (here the humour works as proper parody). There’s a Cardinal M with an atrocious Italian accent and a Friar Q (David Wenham) who makes things like light-bombs — or did he just steal them from the set of Blade II?
With the constant-climax approach of Van Helsing, the action (for all its admittedly skilful effects) becomes kind of numbing, and as you drift into a haze you can sit and count the thefts from and/or echoes of other movies. It is all, as Roland Barthes put it, a tissue of quotations. I must say, though, the baby vampires were — in both senses of the word — fantastic. Let’s have more of them in the sequel or prequel, which will probably be entirely computer-generated. Not a bad idea, that. Van Helsing vs the Baby Vampires. Or has there been one already?
Roads to liberty
LOW-BUDGET MOVIE OF THE WEEK: In This World is an urgently realist account of the grim commerce in human beings, writes Peter Bradshaw.
How many refugees will the Iraq war create? Hundreds of thousands were displaced in 1991, and as many are now expected to cross the borders into Syria, Turkey, Jordan and Iran. Michael Winterbottom’s tough, impassive docu-drama about asylum seekers (winner of a Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival) couldn’t be more timely.
It’s a striking addition to Winterbottom’s eclectic body of work, roughly but not exactly comparable to his Bosnian war movie Welcome to Sarajevo. Using small digital video cameras, improvisation, guerrilla filming and available light, Winterbottom follows the overland refugee route from Pakistan through Iran, Turkey and Italy up to Sangatte, Dover and beyond. This is a route littered with stolen cash, broken dreams and dead bodies.
Winterbottom uses two Afghan non-professionals, Jamal Udin Torabi and Enayatullah, more or less playing themselves as a 16-year-old and his older cousin, and tracks them, as it were in real time, after they bet their borrowings and life savings on a terrifying one-way ticket to London.
In This World is an urgently realist account of the grim commerce in human beings. During the journey itself, we must largely intuit exactly what is going on in these people’s heads, because there is little or no dialogue between the two.
This is a reticent film, both emotionally and intellectually, and for some it may be frustrating. But the harrowingly real picture it paints is daring and ambitious. — Â