Review of I, Frankenstein (2014) by Gimly M — 01 Jan 2015

Every now and then a movie comes along that is just inundated with great casting, and yet is one of the most unwatchably horrendous piles of garbage you will ever come across. Movie 43 is one such film, another is 2001's Planet of the Apes. Green Lantern. X-Men: Last Stand... You get the idea. You watch them and you think to yourself "Goddamn, whoever is pulling the string back there must have some seriously dark shit on these actors, because there is absolutely no way that these talented people would consciously make the decision to be in that movie other than blackmail.

I, Frankenstein isn't quite that bad. It's crap. But not quite on that level. It feels less like the actors were blackmailed, and a little more like they were doing favours. Almost everybody in the bloody thing is Australian. And it was filmed here in Melbourne where I live, so most of the actors probably did them a favour because the movie brought a lot of money in to the country. Bill Nighy has known the crew for a long time so that's why he's here. Kevin Grievoux wrote the comic it's based on so that's his favour. Gotta be honest though, if I was him, I'd be pretty damn mad about what they did to his source material. 'Cause this movie is bad, bad, bad.

But not as bad as I had been lead to believe. There's at least some practical effects, and that's always nice. There may not have been much of a story, and what story there was may not have been very good, or very well explained, but it had one. It knew what it was about and that puts it miles above other 2014 entries of a similar vein like Age of Extinction or 47 Ronin, which just make bullshit up as they go along and end up with something that doesn't even resemble an actual movie.

I, Frankenstein was poor. So poor that I don't believe I'll ever watch it again. But it wasn't so unfathomably rubbish that I couldn't bare watching it the first time, or couldn't like a single thing about it.

36%.

-Gimly.