Van Helsing

Consider whether you would willingly pay someone to punch you in the brain for two continuous hours. If not, you could probably do better than Van Helsing. The second cinematic attempt at updating classic literary characters in as many summers fails just as fantastically as the first (anyone remember superstud Captain Nemo from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?), and this time, they unleash an ungodly barrage of special effects in doing it. The story tracks Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) as he travels the world to snuff out evildoers. And with that last sentence, we’ve already exhausted more energy on the plot than writer-director Stephen Sommers. To compensate, we’re assaulted by CGI effects—some cool, most disturbingly poor for 2004—and a whole lot of nonsense. Choppy editing tries to offset infantile dialogue, which is overshadowed by incoherent Transylvanian accents, which are all eclipsed by an overplayed Dracula that’ll have Count Chocula spinning in his marshmallowy coffin. Even Kate Beckinsale, shoehorned into a bustier as Van Helsing’s sidekick, can’t salvage this suckfest. But it’s not all bad: There’s a sequence close to three minutes in length toward the end during which we weren’t acutely aware of how little we were enjoying ourselves. But even those fleeting moments were vanquished by a return to mediocrity in the conclusion, proving once again that literary legends and CGI don’t mix.