Review of Dracula Untold (2014) by Harry W — 12 May 2015

Though not the most well regarded film, with recommendations from friends I felt like Dracula Untold could have been a decent guilty pleasure.

Dracula Untold seems to want to combine horror film elements with the current medieval craze popularized by Game of Thrones. You would think that as an amalgamation of these themes it would feel innovative, but the word I would use is derivative. With all the generic action blockbusters and fantasy films coming out lately, Dracula Untold feels too much like every other available film, only this one makes use of horror concepts more often. The visuals of the film are arguably its high point, but even they feel too lost within a thin story which is unable to distinguish itself from the crowd of visual effects ridden fantasy films of modern day such as Maleficient. Of course, Dracula Untold is a better film by comparison, but that is not precisely a compliment. The visuals in the film do not really feel that breakthrough, even though they are certainly crafted impressively. It's just that beneath them, there is just little to boast about.

The story feels rushed. Clearly in such a hurry to turn Vlad III Tepes into Dracula and unleash the action. Dracula Untold forgets that it needs to tell a story somewhere along the way. There is little put into characterizing Dracula as the sadistic immortal he has a legacy for and more of a motivation to turn him into one of the X-Men which has its appeal with certain viewers as easy as it will frustrate significantly more. For me, I found that Dracula Untold was just an extremely generic amalgamation of everything that Hollywood demands from viewers these days without the dramatic heft to actually carry it. Like I said, the story is in a rush, and so the audience is never given time to stop and understand the characters or even the context of their story. But since Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless did not care enough to even try and give the film any depth or character, it is simply left in the hands of Gary Shore to make the appeal out of it on a visual basis. As much as I credit the technical setup of the film as being effective, it all feels too dull to really have any appeal as the scale is way too small and the generic fantasy approach to the film neglects its potential to succeed as a horror film. Dracula Untold is frankly just not scary enough to be a horror film, not deep enough to succeed on a dramatic level, not original enough to really captivate the imagination of viewers, not innovative enough in the way it handles its action to be an effective action piece and not large enough in scale to really feel like a medieval war adventure. But worst of all, because the film is so bent on taking itself ridiculously seriously this whole time it fails to have even the slightest moment of either black comedy or unintentional humour which prevents it from reaching the "so bad its good" territory. In actual fact, the word for Dracula Untold is simply overblown because it spends so much money that it doesn't feel like a B-movie even though it has the ridiculously simplistic narrative of one. But the central issue is what it does to the titular character. Dracula Untold forsakes concepts of vampire mythology so that it can appeal strictly as an action film, even though it fails to do that. As a result, Dracula Untold could not have less to do with the iconic horror character and ends up walking the same line as Stuart Beattie's I, Frankenstein from the same year. It hardly looks as cheap, but it matches the overly simplistic narrative coherence. But at least I, Frankenstein reached for something more because Dracula Untold barely feels like it even tried. The story itself is just so thin, and the script gave no interesting characters to the story at all or even the slightest hint of touching drama. Because of that, the viewers cannot help but feel isolated by the genuine artificiality of the film and the fact that it just takes a back seat to visual effects. Despite the decent detail in them, they lose appeal partially because of the repetitively grim colour scheme and the fact that beneath them is nothing to boast about in the slightest. Frankly, Dracula Untold was just too generic and would have been a lot more fun if it was produced by The Asylum. At Least then there could have been a sense of cheap fun rather than a sense of overblown boredom as comes with Dracula Untold.

Luke Evans' leading performance is one of the finest things about Dracula Untold. The film gives him no character to work with, but Luke Evans manages to prove himself by playing a great action hero. Luke Evans grasps the powers of his character and is therefore able to effectively work with the visual effects like one of the X-Men and engaging in the battles with his own powerful talents. Luke Evans not only does this, but he adds value to the film by capturing the complicated nature of the character on a mild level. Given his limitations, Luke Evans transcends the low standard of everything around him through his physical achievements and his genuine ability to bring the world around him to life through his interactions with both the cast and the actual setting. Dracula Untold works to pay a mild sense of credibility to Luke Evans, though the same cannot be said about anyone else involved in the production.

So Luke Evans delivers a decent leading performance the visual effects maintain a mild sense of appeal, but Dracula Untold is ultimately undone by the fact that it feels too derivative of countless films around it which are executed with more innovation instead of a distinct absence of genuine drama, originality or the ability to settle on the correct genre.