Review of Dracula Untold (2014) by Filipeneto — 24 Apr 2018

Sometimes Hollywood likes to fool the public and sell or promote a movie in a way that looks like one thing, but it's quite another. That was the case with this movie. The public expecting a horror film encountered an adventure film; The audience waiting for a film around the true story of Vlad the Impaler (the historical character who inspired the creation of Bram Stoker's horror character) found a mixture of Vlad + Dracula, spiced with the imaginative and unrealistic traits that Hollywood likes to use. It turns out that mixing reality with fiction in such an express way usually gives bad results. It's like a salad where someone has put the wrong sauce: tastes bad and is inedible.

What this film did in practice was to appropriate the names of people who actually existed and places we could actually visit to spice up the old Dracula legend, already described and revisited by countless films. The "cooks" on duty were Gary Shore, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, three newcomers who wanted to make their first movie and decided to bet on a blockbuster Dracula. Unfortunately for the freshmen, it lacked a reason, a differential, because almost all the horror directors and writers have already done something with vampires. So, they had to create a pretext for a new movie, however stingy it might be. The millions made available by Universal, who sponsored this abortion, did the rest and provided the only good thing about this film: the special, visual and sound effects, that fill almost the entire movie to the point of stifling the script itself. But do not think that we have pity on the script! It's a terrible and predictable script that mixes up and distorts reliable historical data, copying and badly pasting it in a tangle of absurdities and clichés. The actors' performance was not great either, but we believe that the guilt wasn't the cast (headed by Luke Evans, who is far from being a rookie) but probably the lack of a skilled director, who can guide the actors accurately while, at the same time, demands a minimally decent text from the writers.

We, the Portuguese, have a popular saying that says, more or less, that the shoemaker cannot play the guitar. This means that each person must do what he knows, according to his abilities. This movie was doomed to failure from the moment they put an inexperienced team behind.