Van Helsing

There are already a plethora of Dracula flicks - many of the more recent ones being entirely awful - do we really need another one? Stephen Sommers seems to think so, and his idea of taking every fictional Victorian monster and having Stoker's original demon hunter Van Helsing slay them does sound promising. But the film just doesn't know what it wants to be. It tries to be scary, but with a 12A rating, it can't be. It wants to be funny, but with a drab script and wooden actors, it can't be. It wan't to be exciting, but again it fails as every monster and locaction is so obviously CGId, there's never any sense of danger. And any designs the film has on being a crowd-pleasing summer blockbuster are quashed by the gloomy locations and feel-bad conclusion. Disappointingly dull, and hideously sentimental at inappropriate times. Perhaps things could be rectified in a sequel (which is obviously being set up), though with all 19th-century demons vanquished (including a cameo from Mr Hyde), who knows what direction the plot would take...