Ticketworthy! - Dracula

Much like the character himself, the world’s fascination with Count Dracula simply refuses to die. There’s an argument to be made that he is the most enduring literary character in history, or at least one of them. Part of the longevity of the tale may be due to the mix of horror, violence, and romance that are present in nearly every telling of it. There is something unique about what parts of human nature Count Dracula represents. The newest take on the character, director Luc Besson’s Dracula, tries to capture those elements in a fresh and compelling new way. It fails almost completely.

Examining the story in a new way, this version focuses more heavily on Dracula (Caleb Landry Jones) himself and his 400 year-long quest to find the reincarnation of his murdered wife, Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu). He finds his lost love in the form of a young woman named Mina and sets out to return her memories to her and make her fall in love with him again. Standing in his way are Mina’s fiancé, Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid) and a brave Priest (Christoph Waltz).

Unsurprisingly, much of the film focuses on Jones’ Dracula, and the actor does not shrink from the challenge. He is charming and suave in the same breath that he is menacing and brutal. He plays the lovesick man and the murderous monster as a single entity and captures both well. The rest of the cast is good enough, though they are all given very little to really do, but it is Jones that carries the film on his shoulders.

Between his performance and the beautifully realized setting, the movie almost manages to work. Each locale visited in the film is well put together and an absolute pleasure to look at. Even some of questionable CGI choices in the movie don’t drag it down. Not even silly, ugly gargoyles that serve the Count. They are pointless and terribly rendered, but most everything else looks good enough that they don’t actively make the movie worse.

That job falls to pretty much every other aspect of the movie. The script is a jumbled mess that tells parts of three different stories without really paying off any of them. Had the plot focused on one idea, there could have been hope. When Dracula is recounting his backstory and his search for Elisabeta, for instance, the move almost manages to be engaging. Unfortunately, it’s interrupted by jumps back to the present that do little more than re-hash the original story we’re all used to. It seems like a mistake trying to spread the script so thin, and the movie suffers for it.

The biggest complaint that can be levied at the film, however, is just how safe it is. It takes no chances of offending anybody. It’s not scary in the slightest, each set is shockingly well lit and devoid of anything that might be seen as even creepy. Blood is practically non-existent, at least by the standards of a modern vampire movie. Dracula doesn’t need over-the-top gore to be effective, but if the character is mowing down rooms of soldiers, we should probably see a few splashes of red once in a while.

Finally, the romance, which is supposedly central to this version of the story, is downright tame when it even bothers to exist at all. There’s a brief, passionate kiss, and Jones spends almost all of his screentime making his best “yearning” face, but the Dracula and Mina spend only a few minutes actually on screen together. Their “love” barely makes it into the movie and ultimately doesn’t amount to much.

In the end, Dracula is a movie that wants to be different but doesn’t have the guts to be good. It’s a shame, because there’s a lot to like about the film and Jones in particular. It just never quite comes together. If it is remembered at all, it will be as another in a long line of half-hearted vampire movies with no fangs at all.