For too long now (it’s starting to feel like 1,000 years), Dracula movies have been an industry, a monster brand unto themselves. At this point, it’s like seeing the umpteenth version of a Shakespeare warhorse or a musical like “Annie” — what is there left to discover? The saga of Dracula has become an endless rerun. And even if you don’t feel like you’ve already lived through a century’s worth of Dracula movies, and that they’ve wrung this story dry, there have been two elaborately eye-catching and overproduced recent versions — “Renfield,” in which Nicolas Cage did his thing as Dracula (the same thing he’s been doing since “Vampire’s Kiss,” in 1989), and Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu,” in which the ratio of awesome production design to interesting drama was about seven to one. (I’d say something similar about Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” but that’s another story.)
So here we are again, caught up in the never-ending slow-drip flood of cinematic Dracula mythology, now with Luc Besson’s wan, derivative, dutifully time-period-hopping, different-but-not-really-new take on the vampire legend. The movie, big surprise, wants to be more “romantic” than horrific (my sarcasm descends from the fact that this is already an entire category of Dracula movie, dating back to the 1979 Frank Langella version). Come for the fangs, stay for the swoons. As the kids used to say, BFD.
Caleb Landry Jones, a very good actor, starts off by playing Dracula as a shockingly direct descendant of what Gary Oldman did in the opening 45 minutes of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” The makeup is a total knockoff: the white hair piled in a neat bun (in this case with two long side bangs), the rotting parchment skin, the fossilized teeth, all enhanced by the winning delicacy of Jones’ performance, starting with the way he says (à la Oldman), “I am Vlad, the second prince of Volokia. Count…Dragoool.” Jones’s Dragoool suggests a fusion of Oldman, Karloff’s Mummy and the Cryptkeeper, with shades of Klaus Kinski, Willem Dafoe, Heath Ledger and a grimacing carp.
Dracula hosts Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid) in his spired castle (it’s as huge as Notre Dame) at the foot the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. But we meet him when he’s a young prince in 1480 Eastern Europe, drawn into battle and away from his beloved wife, Elisabeta (Zoë Blue). The two are first seen cavorting in the sheets, but she soon gets slaughtered, and this causes him such anguish that he can no longer accept God’s provenance. He says to the priest, “Tell God that until he brings back my wife, my life no longer belongs to Him.” Cue a thunderclap and a statue of Jesus dripping a tear of blood.
Danny Elfman’s score, echoing the waltz theme of “Rosemary’s Baby,” is more atmospheric than anything else in “Dracula,” which Besson has staged like a music-video director who has grown too weary for fast cutting. Once the film leaps ahead to Paris in the late 1800s, Jones appears as a dandified version of his princely self. But here, as in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (which I always thought should have been called “Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula”), the lead actor is more compelling as the ancient, ethereal, elfin-demon Dracula than he is as the long-haired Lothario in a top hat speaking in a vague Transylvanian accent. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” went to sleep during the more contemporary sections, and so goes Besson’s “Dracula,” which is basically about its title vamp trying to romance Mina, who is presented as the reincarnation of Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu plays both roles). Dracula: “Madame, it is an honor and a pleasure to see you again.” Mina: “Have we met before?” Dracula: “In a dream, perhaps. I have this strange feeling that we have known each other…for a long time.” The audience: “Zzzzzz.“
It’s not as if we needed to see “Dracula” remade as a blood-soaked Valentine’s Day movie. Christoph Waltz is on hand as the Van Helsing character, known simply as the Priest, and he does his tastefully understated scenery-chewing. There’s one splashingly gory sequence, when Maria (Matilda De Angelis), Dracula’s first disciple, goes demon and gets decapitated and staked-through-the-heart. The film finally returns to Dracula’s castle, where four stone gargoyles come to life, and where there is bad swordplay, schlocky cannon fire, and a fortune-cookie theological lecture from Waltz’s Priest. At the end of the movie he says, “The spell is broken.” Watching this “Dracula,” we know just what he means.
English (US) ·