Rating: B-
Dir: Luc Besson
Star: Caleb Landry Jones, Zoë Bleu, Christoph Waltz, Ewens Abid
Been a while, Mr. Besson. It’s been a bit downhill for him lately. Anna was okay. But considering he was close to my favourite director in the nineties, the likes of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets were… not great. This is something of an improvement, being a lush, Gothic romance, obviously heavily influenced by Francis Ford Coppola’s take on the story, by leaning into the romance between Count Dracula (Jones) and Mina (Bleu), the reincarnation of his wife from four centuries earlier, Elisabeta. In some ways, I’d call it an improvement over Coppola’s. It’s less soppy, and there is no equivalent to Keanu Reeves going full Dick Van Dyke on us. That’s a win.
It begins like gangbusters, with Dracula rejecting God after his wife is killed by a Turkish ambush. The costumes and armour on view here are spectacular (top). We then fast forward to late 19th-century France, where the Van Helsing equivalent (Waltz) is investigating the capture of a new vampire. He’s great: Waltz delivers the explanatory dialogue with the same conviction as Peter Cushing. Because he believes what he’s saying, so do we. Only then do we finally get Jonathan Harker (Abid), whose middle name appears to be “Oblivious”, arriving at Castle Dracula as in Bram Stoker’s novel. This version has gargoyle-like minions, rather than vampire Eurototty such as Monica Bellucci, which I will admit, is something of a downgrade. Events thereafter largely play out as expected, albeit with additional longing Drac/Mina glances.
Weirdly, I felt Jones was more convincing in his 400-year-old form, than after changing back into a young hottie. This transformation is achieved through the former talking his way into a convent and bulk seducing all the nuns. I must admit, I did have to wonder briefly, if an old geezer who is totally irresistible to young virgins, was some kind of Besson wish-fulfillment. Once Dracula becomes a 19th-century French hipster, I found him less interesting: the same went for Gary Oldman too, of course. However, Jones is solid, and the performances across the board are a palpable improvement over Valerian. There are embarrassing gaffes, like France and Romania having a border. Which would be news to Switzerland, Austria and Hungary, the countries actually between them. Some questions about exactly when the Eiffel Tower was built might also come to mind.
However, this is a film about vampires, so I’m prepared to forgive its shaky knowledge of geography and history. It’s interesting to compare it to the recent lumbering Del Toro adaptation of Frankenstein. This is better, simply by not whacking the audience over the head with any message: if there’s one here, I missed it. I can see why this take would be divisive, and we were genuinely surprised to see Danny Elfman’s name crop up in the end credits, since the soundtrack is disappointingly generic. In general, though, I’d say it’s better than most of the recent wave of nu-vampire movies (looking at you, Renfield). Probably more purely entertaining than the recent remake of Nosferatu too, I suspect.