Drugs may seem fun at first, but hitting the crack pipe hard before every time you sit down to write the script to the big budget action movie you plan on directing may not be the best course of action.
XOXO, Simon.
That�s right. Exploding flying vampire babies.
�But Simon! This is just meant to be mindless fun! It�s purely for entertainment! Why do you want some deeper meaning?�
Fine, I�m picky. But I can do mindless entertainment. I can, but only when it�s, for a start, legitimately entertaining, and when someone in the cast or crew to know exactly what the fuck is going on. Van Helsing makes no sense! It moves randomly from one scene to another in a fruitless effort to fit as many Universal monsters and action sequences in as possible, but it all just turns out to be a horrible mess. I can�t tell if there was too much or too little plot. There were a lot of developments, I suppose, but all of them meant nothing more than getting Van and his crew to the next location for shit to break out at.
The dialogue is predictably bad, but the script really oozes this awfulness when the film tries to go serious. This happens on more than one occasion, too. The action stops, and everyone looks meaningful, and we�re told to buy these out of place and shockingly written, acted and directed "heartfelt" moments. It almost makes you wish you could go back to the terrible exposition or useless plot development.
The acting�s mostly pretty standard, and brought down further by the stupid accent. But Roxburgh deserves special mention, because� Really, the only appropriate words are �Oh, Jesus fucking Christ�. He�s bad. He�s very, very bad. I think Sommers looked at his performance in Moulin Rouge (which was self-aware enough to work) and said �Richard, you know, you were really far too subtle in that role.� He�s burdened with the �Drrra-KOO-lah� accent, for a start. Mix into that the random screaming of some lines, and at one point, random just plain screaming at his brides. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Every moment Dracula is on screen, your head threatens to cave in due to pure awfulness.
So, the script is useless. The acting goes from being standard to being extremely useless. However, I�ll give Sommers a tiny bit of credit for the action. It�s extremely kinetic, and considering the amount of CG used, it blends in well, at least some of the time. There�s also some pretty nice camera sweeps during the larger action scenes too, but the sheer mediocrity of every other aspect of the film renders all this moot, because honestly, no one gives a shit.
It�s not quite as big a mess as House of the Dead, but is that really an achievement? Besides, this had a much larger budget, so the being a mess to budget ratio is much higher. So, who would have ever thought that Deep Rising would be a relative highlight of Stephen Sommer�s career?
