Cast: Luke Evans, Kelly Reilly, Norma Dixit, Skye Lucia Degruttola, Olivia Chenery, Jason Maza, Stacy Hall
Cathy Noland (Reilly) owns a florist shop in a small town, and seems happy being on her own. What she doesn’t know is that Lewis (Evans) has been watching her for months, learning everything he can about her, and tracking her daily routines. When she leaves a yoga class at the end of the day, Lewis grabs her in the parking lot and quickly ties her up and gags her before putting her in the boot of his car. He takes her to his home where he puts her in a soundproofed, hidden room. It soon becomes clear that Lewis has some questions for Cathy, and they may have something to do with a medical malpractice trial that he’s following on television. Cathy tries to escape, but isn’t successful, and as time passes, Lewis presses her to tell the truth about herself (starting with her name) and how it all relates to his wife, Alana (Chenery), and how she recently died. When Lewis finally learns the truth, it isn’t what he’s expecting, and he’s caught off guard when Cathy makes her next attempt at escaping…
The kind of mystery thrller that comes and goes without anyone really noticing it, 10×10 starts off well, but then stumbles repeatedly on its way to a violent showdown between Evans’ angry kidnapper and Reilly’s resourceful captive. Again, as with a lot of mystery thrillers, there’s the germ of a good idea here, but Noel Clarke’s screenplay (he also produces, and cameos as a waiter in a diner) is unable to connect the narrative dots in such a way that the movie forms into a cohesive whole. The script also tries to subvert audience expectations by throwing in a couple of “unexpected” twists along the way, and though these attempts are laudable in and of themselves, they don’t carry any weight or have any dramatic impact. Instead of being surprised, or even shocked, the average viewer’s reaction is likely to be a shrug of indifference. Part of the problem is the movie’s unfortunate habit of presenting scenes that act independently from the ones that precede and follow them, or which fail to increase the tension. One such scene involves Lewis driving to a favourite spot he and Alana went to. A squad car pulls up, and for a moment it looks as if Lewis is going to be in trouble. Only for a moment, though…
With scenes such as these being resolved too quickly, all that remains is for the cat and mouse game between Lewis and Cathy to hold the attention and provide all the thrills (the violent assaults that pepper the narrative soon become derivative and perfunctory in the way they’re staged and play out). Alas, once Cathy is kidnapped, any tension soon dissipates as the script’s awkward machinations are further undermined by first-time director Ewing’s unoriginal handling. Between the house’s open plan living area and the hidden room is a corridor; the number of times Lewis and Cathy run down it in either direction is about the only scary thing the viewer can rely on. In the end, and despite Evans’ and Reilly’s best efforts, the movie loses its way completely and becomes yet another generic thriller that is so generic it even includes a scene where the villain of the piece is supposedly dead – only to be miraculously resurrected the very next minute. When a movie resorts to such crude tactics in order to raise some excitement, then you know it’s been in trouble for some time already.
Rating: 3/10 – a woeful movie that is almost wholly free of subtext or metaphor, 10×10‘s main achievement is that it was made in the first place and induced both Evans and Reilly to take part; almost an object lesson in how not to create a tense, exciting thriller, this is one to avoid in favour of almost anything else.
Cast: Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, Bella Heathcote, Connie Britton, JJ Feild, Oliver Platt, Chris Conroy, Alexa Havins
The creation of Wonder Woman, or at least, the source of her creation, is the kind of story that should be filed under “so incredible it must be true”. And that’s exactly right. Wonder Woman was the lasso-twirling, tiara-wearing brainchild of ex-Harvard faculty member William Moulton Marston (Evans), a psychology professor who also invented the systolic blood pressure cuff used with lie detectors (though he forgot to patent it). Wonder Woman was born out of Marston’s belief that women could only truly be happy by “submitting to a loving authority”, i.e. a husband. As a result, the early Wonder Woman comic strips were full of scenes of bondage, domination and spanking, with the majority of the female characters passively accepting their situations. Some of this was due to the structure of Marston’s private life. He was married to Elizabeth (Hall), also a professor of psychology, and they in turn lived with a research assistant of Marston’s who became their joint lover, Olive Byrne (Heathcote). Both women had children by Marston, and for a number of years their living arrangements went unquestioned. This polyamorous relationship led to Marston’s creation of the Amazonian princess, but even though the Wonder Woman comic strip was enormously popular, its content ensured that it would fall under the spotlight of Josette Frank (Britton) and the Child Study Association of America, and find itself at risk of public censure…
In telling Marston’s story, and that of Elizabeth and Olive, Angela Robinson’s earnest biopic relates a story of a ménage à trois that succeeded on its own terms, and in flagrant defiance of the societal norms of the period. This is the movie’s focus: not the creation of Wonder Woman, but the creation of a three-way relationship that withstood both internal and external pressures, the addition of children (four in total), long periods where Marston was reliant on his writing to bring in money (Elizabeth was a better breadwinner), and which did so because of the trio’s commitment to each other (though inevitably, there’s a blip). Robinson’s screenplay is firmly on the side of Marston and his two Wonder Women, and the personal and sexual explorations they undertook in order to make their relationship work, and if there isn’t too much in the way of judgment or objective criticism about the nature of their private lives, then it doesn’t hurt the story overall. But there are moments where the narrative seems in need of a dramatic push, and Robinson obliges accordingly.
But this is a movie about feelings, and emotions, and the best way of expressing them. Refreshingly, and aside from a closing scene in a hospital room that seems to go on for far too long (see if you think someone should have come in at some point), the characters make their points succinctly and quickly before moving on the next, and despite some occasionally clunky expository dialogue, the cast all give strong, skillful performances. It’s good to see Evans taking on a more meatier role than of late, and he expertly navigates the twin poles of Marston’s personality, aiming for dominance in his public and working lives, while being submissive in private. Hall is terrific as Elizabeth, hiding her vulnerability and insecurities behind a fearsome exterior, and Heathcote is equally impressive as Olive, the young woman neither Marston nor his wife can live without. As a framing device, Marston’s meeting with Frank doesn’t always tie up with what amount to flashbacks of his life up until then, but it does give the viewer a better understanding of Marston’s views on relationships and submission and all areas in between. This is a movie that’s unafraid to explore issues surrounding marriage and polygamy and notions of what constitutes individual pleasure, and in doing so proves itself to be intelligent and thought-provoking, though a little too matter-of-fact in its approach.
Rating: 7/10 – purposeful and intense for the most part, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women plays it straight, and in doing so, does justice to its trio of lead characters and their unconventional lifestyles; Bryce Fortner’s cinematography adds a layer of nostalgia to things, and Robinson is to be congratulated for interpreting Marston’s life in such a way that the majority of the movie remains plausible if not always entirely convincing.
Cast: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans, Edgar Ramírez, Laura Prepon, Allison Janney, Darren Goldstein, Lisa Kudrow
Whenever a novel becomes an unexpectedly massive success – such as Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train did in 2015 – then a movie adaptation is sure to follow. But what happens when the source material isn’t strong enough to support a movie version? What do the makers of such a movie do to combat this? The answer, when you watch the movie version of The Girl on the Train, becomes obvious quite quickly: they don’t do anything, they merely transcribe events and characters to the screen and do nothing to circumvent the problems in the novel. Oh – and they do so in the hope that no one will notice.
From the beginning of The Girl on the Train we have a clumsy voice over that introduces us to Rachel Watson, a thirty-two year old woman who rides the train to and from work every day, and who seems to have created a fantasy world built around another woman (Bennett) that she sees most days from the train. The woman in question piques Rachel’s interest, as she lives a few doors away from where Rachel’s ex-husband Tom (Theroux) lives with his new wife, Anna (Ferguson), and their baby daughter, Evie. Believing this woman to have a perfect marriage (but having no real reason to believe this at all), Rachel is shocked one morning to see her kissing a man who isn’t her husband.
Rachel is so disturbed by this that she decides to confront the woman. But Rachel is an alcoholic, and though she makes the attempt, she suffers a blackout and wakes the next morning with cuts and bruises and blood on her clothes – but no memory of how any of it happened. Things get worse when a detective (Janney) visits Rachel and asks her if she knows the woman, whose name is Megan. Megan has gone missing, and because Rachel was spotted in the area where Megan was last seen, the detective wonders if Rachel is involved in Megan’s disappearance in some way. Able to stall the detective’s questions, Rachel then makes a fateful decision.
Anyone who has read the book will know that Rachel’s decision is to involve herself in the life of Megan’s husband, Scott (Evans). And the movie follows this route as well – how could it not? – but as with the novel, the movie has the same problem: her decision makes no sense at all. It’s obvious from Rachel’s behaviour – when she’s not fantasizing about a complete stranger, she’s stalking her ex-husband – that she’s got what you’d politely call “issues”, but the only reason the movie has for this behaviour is the fact that Rachel is an alcoholic. It was a contributing factor in her divorce from Tom, and it leads to a couple of minor revelations later on, but it ends up being a catch-all for anything she does that seems a bit manic or ill-advised. The novel tries to make her appear vulnerable; here she just seems desperate.
But as her involvement with Scott is passed off as trying to help (and punish Megan if she stops being missing), Rachel abandons all sense of decency and respect for the ordeal Scott is going through, and pushes her own agenda, which is to find Megan’s abductor or killer – and hope that it isn’t her. This leads to a couple of major revelations, and a final denouement that will have female audiences cheering, and male audiences shaking their heads at the reverse misogyny on display. In essence, the problems in the novel have become the problems in the movie.
The main problem audiences will have is a lack of someone to even remotely care about. Despite a powerful and from time to time, deeply moving performance by Blunt, The Girl on the Train operates in an emotional vacuum. The trials and tribulations of the various characters are often on display, but it’s like watching a trio of strong-minded women who’ve all decided to give up on being independent, and who can only define themselves through their relationships with men. Rachel is the ex-wife who can’t deal with the fact that her marriage is over, Megan is the wife who needs affairs to feel some kind of connection with herself, and Anna is the ex-lover turned second wife whose chief function is being the mother of Tom’s child. Viewers may find themselves put off by the relentless undermining these characters experience, and the various ways the movie reinforces the ways in which said characters were undermined in the novel.
But beyond all the ersatz feminism, there remains the problem of the central mystery. Megan’s disappearance becomes a murder enquiry when her body is discovered in some nearby woods. But though Rachel wonders if she did kill Megan during her blackout, the likelihood of that actually having happened is so small it’s on a virtually sub-atomic level. So that leaves Anna, a character so gloriously one-dimensional that Ferguson’s talents as an actress are wasted; her husband Tom, whose outward calm and sincerity masks a need to control his environment; and tortured husband Scott, whose wild, angry outbursts could be a smokescreen for something much darker. And those are the only suspects, as the man Megan is seen kissing is her shrink, Dr Kamal Abdic (Ramírez), and despite the screenplay’s ham-fisted attempt to put him in the frame, he’s the classic red herring. This then makes it easy to work out who killed Megan, and also why.
For a thriller based on the novel “that shocked the world” – really? – The Girl on the Train is a bit of a damp squib, only showing signs of life when focusing on Blunt’s portrayal of Rachel. Blunt brings some much needed craft to her performance, ensuring that while everyone around her aims for competent, she’s proving capable of giving a layered, compassionate performance that elevates the material whenever her alcoholism is mentioned, or she’s on screen. In contrast, Taylor, who failed to find the motivation to make The Help (2011) as compelling as it should have been, leaves the viewer with the feeling he’s only semi-engaged with the project, and as a result, none of it resonates in the way that it should. It all leaves the movie looking and sounding like an uninspired echo of the original novel – and a less than engaging one at that.
Rating: 5/10 – slickly, professionally made, but as hollow as an Easter egg, The Girl on the Train delivers low rent thrills and annoying plot developments as it unfolds the mystery of Megan Hipwell’s disappearance; the non-linear approach of the novel is retained, and used to good effect, but this is still one literary adaptation that should have been more enticing and rewarding than it actually is.
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy, Keeley Hawes, Peter Ferdinando, Sienna Guillory, Reece Shearsmith, Louis Suc, Enzo Cilenti, Augustus Prew, Dan Renton Skinner, Stacy Martin, Bill Paterson
First published in 1975, J.G. Ballard’s novel, High-Rise, was originally meant to be made in the late Seventies by director Nicolas Roeg from a script by Paul Mayersberg. That particular project fell through, and for a while afterwards Vincenzo Natali was attached along with Richard Stanley as screenwriter, but that fell through as well. Fast forward to 2014 and writer/director Ben Wheatley – along with his wife, screenwriter Amy Jump – develops the movie along with long-term attached producer Jeremy Thomas, and the result is an edgy, claustrophobic thriller that never quite achieves the goals it sets for itself.
We meet the movie’s central protagonist, Dr Robert Laing (Hiddleston), at a time when anarchy and violence have overtaken the residents of the tower block in which he lives. Holed up in the apartment he bought several months before, Laing is surviving against the odds, surrounded by the debris of his previously ordered and carefully maintained lifestyle. Pragmatic and sanguine about his future, the first thing to understand about Laing is that he’s showing no sign of leaving the tower block he lives in. The question that follows is a simple one: what could possibly have happened to bring Laing to this point?
The movie takes us back three months and Laing’s arrival at the tower block designed by architect Anthony Royal (Irons), an experiment in social living that houses the lower classes on the lower floors, and the upper classes on the upper floors (and Royal and his wife in the penthouse suite). Laing’s apartment is somewhere in the middle, an unwelcoming collection of drably painted rooms that he makes no attempt to improve upon or make his own. He’s an aloof man, a little socially awkward, but he does attract the attention of his upstairs neighbour, Charlotte (Miller), and her son, Toby (Suc). She invites him to a party where Laing is introduced to some of the other residents, including documentary movie maker Richard Wilder (Evans) and his heavily pregnant wife, Helen (Moss).
Laing also attracts the attention of Royal, and the two meet privately, though Laing’s aloof nature keeps him at a distance from the disappointments voiced by Royal in relation to the social engineering that isn’t going as well as he’d hoped. There’s also the problem of his wife, Ann (Hawes), and her unhappiness at being cooped up in the penthouse suite, while her husband tries to perfect his plans for the tower block and the others being built nearby. With the power to the building frequently out for long periods, and the divisions between the affluent and the less well off growing wider and wider with each passing day, Laing finds himself caught between both camps in his efforts to blend in anonymously.
Wilder, and his distrust and disapproval for those more privileged than himself, proves to be the catalyst for the kind of hostile rule breaking that makes the more well off residents angry and afraid that their ordered existence is in jeopardy. A party gets out of hand, and sees the beginning of the end of order within the tower block, as residents band together in various groups to impose their own versions of order on each other, but with the upper classes holding the upper hand – and crowing about it. But even their confidence proves short-lived, and Royal’s attempts to calm things aside, no one knows how to restore order to everyone’s satisfaction. It’s not long before mutual hatred leads to violence and murder, and the breakdown of civilised behaviour amongst the tower block’s denizens.
In adapting J.G. Ballard’s highly regarded novel, Wheatley has retained the Seventies period setting – all browns and oranges in the colour scheme, many of the male characters sporting excessive facial hair – and has created an isolated (and isolating) sense of space in the tower block designed by the well-meaning yet naïve Royal. With the building’s harsh lines and overwhelming size offering a sense of foreboding that’s hard to ignore, the movie’s visual design is at once disconcerting and strangely inviting, an uneasy mix of large, empty spaces and claustrophobic interiors that draws in the viewer and keeps them as unsettled as the residents of the lower floors. It’s an impressive achievement, the tower block’s dark shadows and labyrinthine feel a potent mix that is hard to shake off.
Class divisions are at the core of the movie though, as Ballard’s clinical dissection of suburban mores and failings is given a thorough, if overbearing, once-over by Jump’s screenplay. Prejudice and bias, arrogance and denial, contempt and xenophobia, malice and psychosis – the script piles it all on with darkly comic attention to detail, and yet in such a fashion that none of it is as effective as the script, and Wheatley’s often fevered direction, would like. All these elements are combined in such a way that each of the characters experiences them to some degree or other, but not in a way that enhances the descent into self-induced madness and chaos they endure, or even the emotional fallout that results. The residents all behave appallingly, but in the same way that they find themselves trapped within the building, so too does the script trap them in a web of limited motivation, unexplained choices, and hasty reversals. The result is a movie where everyone behaves as if they’ve lost control of their ability to reason, while at the same time, behaving with a single-minded purpose: to destroy their lives and the lives of those around them.
If the bulk of the cast and characters are all required to behave in a fashion that suggests mass-induced paranoia, then it could be said that Jump and Wheatley are creating a world where this is inevitable when such class divisions are thrown together into a huge melting pot. Animosity will prevail, both seem to be saying, and it doesn’t matter how cultured or couth you may be, you’ll lower yourself accordingly in order to survive. Which leaves us with Laing, a character who starts off as being intriguing but soon becomes a cypher, a man it’s hard to identify with or even root for. As the tower block begins to disintegrate around him, he retreats from the carnage going on outside the door to his apartment, and gives in to emotional and physical lethargy, avoiding the world he’s now a part of, and retreating into himself. The movie loses its protagonist, and descends into an extended series of scenes where the focus becomes muddled due to the decision to explore various forms of maladroit behaviour in a mannered, and compromising way. The narrative, ostensibly about Laing and his reaction to the events going on around him, loses steam and becomes weighed down by stylistic excess and a repetitive disregard for its own narrative.
At least the performances, though mannered and harking back to the period in which the movie is set, are uniformly enjoyable, even if they’re often required to spout clichés and banal justifications in support of their actions. Hiddleston does extremely well as the odd man out, the outsider blessed with the ability to see beyond the tower block and the state of disillusion everyone is feeling, but who nevertheless finds himself embroiled in the angry wishes of the mob. Irons is astute and nowhere near all-seeing as Royal thinks he is, which adds to the character’s tragedy. Miller is fine as the object of several men’s lust, while Evans adds another powerful role to his career CV as the man whose anger makes him more dangerous than anyone else.
Rating: 6/10 – a movie that lacks recognisable depths in its characters, and avoids giving them appreciable feelings in the process, High-Rise takes its setting’s microcosm-in-sharp-relief and expands on it without fully exploring the consequences of anyone’s actions (even Charlotte’s); maddening for how good it could have been with a sharper attention to relevant emotional details, it’s still a thought-provoking movie, albeit one that loses its audience by letting its characters flail about unnecessarily and to little benefit.
Cast: Luke Evans, Dominic Cooper, Sarah Gadon, Art Parkinson, Charles Dance, Diarmaid Murtagh, Paul Kaye
Set in the Middle Ages in Eastern Europe, fealty to the Sultan of Turkey is observed by the giving of a thousand boys to be trained in his army. Such is the early fate of Vlad Tepes (Evans), who grows up to be a fierce warrior and friend of the subsequent Turkish ruler, Mehmet (Cooper). Turning his back on war, Vlad returns home to rule his people. He marries Mirena (Gadon) and has a son, Ingeras (Parkinson). After years of peace, Vlad is alerted to the presence of Turkish scouts in his homeland. He tracks them to Broken Tooth Mountain, where in a cave that reveals itself as a slaughterhouse, Vlad comes face to face with a monster (Dance). He escapes, but not before two of his men have been claimed by the creature. Returning home, Father Lucien (Kaye) advises Vlad of the creature’s origins, and its vampiric nature. They decide to keep their knowledge a secret between them.
A Turkish envoy, come to collect his master’s tribute, tells Vlad the Sultan wants a thousand boys for his army. Vlad wavers over doing his duty to the Sultan and doing what’s best for his people. When the Sultan’s envoy adds that Mehmet wants a thousand and one boys, and the extra boy should be Ingeras, Vlad is even further torn. But at the point of giving his son to the envoy, Vlad makes a fateful decision: no boys will go to the Sultan. War is inevitable, but Vlad seeks a way to avoid his people being decimated by the Turkish hordes. He returns to Broken Tooth Mountain where he confronts the vampire and asks to share in his power. The creature agrees but stipulates that if Vlad is to drink any human blood in the next three days then he will be cursed as a vampire forever, and unable to be fully human again.
When the Turks march on Castle Dracula, Vlad goes out to meet them alone… and he decimates their forces. With a greater army on the way, headed by Mehmet himself, Vlad orders his people to move to a monastery high up in the mountains, somewhere it will be difficult for the Turks to attack directly. A surprise attack leaves Mirena and Ingeras in peril, but Vlad saves them using his newfound powers. The next day, at the monastery, suspicions over Vlad’s new powers leads to him being attacked by his own people. He survives to rebuke them, telling them that what he has done is because of them, and that they should be concentrating on Mehmet’s approaching army.
Arriving just before dawn, the Turkish forces are met by Vlad but they prove to be a decoy for a smaller force that gains entry to the monastery and targets Mirena and Ingeras. With their fates intertwined with his, Vlad is forced to make a decision that will affect all their lives, and bring him face to face with his boyhood friend.
Dracula Untold is yet another reboot of an established and well-defined character that seeks to make them look less like a monster and more like someone who has to be bad in order to do good (this year’s Maleficent is another example). It’s a strange phenomenon in the movies these days, almost as if moviemakers feel they have to apologise for these characters’ behaviour. It also ends up rendering them relatively anaemic (excuse the pun) in comparison to their original incarnation. And so it proves with this reimagining of the Dracula story.
While the initial idea is sound – show how Vlad Tepes, Transylvanian prince and hero to his people became Dracula, bloodthirsty monster feared by all – the movie fumbles its way through its attempts to create an origin story partly based on historical fact and partly on romantic fiction. Vlad is shown as a peaceful man reigning in a vicious, cruel capacity for violence but even though we see the the results of his warlike nature – the infamous impalings on the battlefield – it’s hard to associate the two differing temperaments. As played by a suitably brooding Evans, Vlad is a bit of a wimp in the opening scenes, browbeaten by the Turkish envoy and then dismissed by Mehmet in a scene where Vlad pleads for clemency in relation to the thousand boys. Vlad doesn’t appear the proud leader of men he’s meant to be, but more an easily cowed man with no stomach for a fight. It’s only when he saves his son and kills some of Mehmet’s men that he shows some mettle.
It’s here that Dracula Untold finally becomes a vampire movie, reintroducing Dance’s withered creature, and setting up a future storyline if the movie is as successful at the box office as Universal hope it will be (they have a modern Monsters Cinematic Universe in mind). The bargain is made, allowing the inevitable tragedy of such a bargain to begin playing out. Vlad tries to deny his thirst for blood while Mirena marvels at the disappearance of his battle scars. And in a scene of limited ferocity and actual bloodshed, Vlad takes on a thousand Turks and kills them all. But it’s all done at a remove, with the intensity of the situation dialled down a notch or two, and Vlad’s predicament reduced to the level of suffering occasional stomach cramps. From here, the movie picks up the pace but it’s at the expense of time-related logic and dramatic credibility.
With Vlad needing to defeat Mehmet and his army within three days, the Turks’ ability to travel huge distances in such a short space of time goes unquestioned, while Vlad creates a vampire horde of his own to take them on (would a ruler who truly cares for his people do such a thing even if they were on the verge of dying?). And the script tries for an ironic twist – Vlad’s fate is sealed by the one person he loves most – that feels hackneyed and short on originality.
Muddled though the movie is for the most part, it’s stronger in its performances. Evans brings a brutish physicality to the role that suits the warrior Vlad, and he dominates scenes just by being present. He’s a more thoughtful actor than you might expect from his resumé, and he does his best to offset some of the more florid dialogue in the script, as well as making Vlad a more rounded character. Gadon also gives a good performance, matching Evans for intensity in their scenes together and making Mirena slightly more than the wife who waits anxiously at home while her man goes off to battle. Dance radiates a cold disdain as the trapped “master vampire” though his voice retains too much of its recognisable charm to make that disdain truly chilling. Parkinson proves an adequate match for the demands of a role that could so easily have been more stereotypically presented, while Kaye as Father Lucien has a small but pivotal role that he acquits himself well in (even if some audience members will be saying to themselves, “but that’s Dennis Pennis”). The only disappointment is Cooper, once again confirming his limited range as an actor, and making Mehmet look and sound like an arrogant jerk.
In the director’s chair, Shore (making his feature debut) uses his experience working in high-end commercials to provide some impressive visuals – one shot shows Vlad taking on the Turks as reflected in the blade of a sword – and shows a confidence that bodes well for the future if it’s combined with a better script. He’s clearly comfortable directing actors as well, and the performances are as much to his credit as to theirs. The photography by John Schwartzman is predictably gloomy, though it avoids the steely gray-blue aesthetic of the Underworld series, and there’s a dramatic if occasionally intrusive score courtesy of Ramin Djawadi that is used to good effect throughout.
Ultimately, Dracula Untold is a bit of a mixed bag, its historical pretensions never fully reconciled with its need to reinvent its title character. The script – by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless – remains jumbled throughout and it’s this lack of focus that hampers things the most. As an entreé into the revamped (excuse the pun) world of Universal’s collection of classic monsters it’s maybe not quite the start the company were looking for, but it’s also not as bad as it could have been.
Rating: 5/10 – despite some occasionally severe deficiencies in the script, Dracula Untold is a solid, unpretentious reintroduction to the world’s most (in)famous vampire; a good mix of the epic and the intimate also helps but the characters remain at too much of a remove to make us truly care what happens to them.
