When was the last decent Dracula movie made? I can't even remember. I think it's all due to it that modern adaptations all feel the need to be different and original with its story, instead of staying true to its source material. It changes all of the classic and well know characters and gives an original spin to the story, that however rarely ever works out.
This movie as well is...different. It isn't depicting Dracula as the classical vampire character but instead as a...well, I don't even really know what they were trying to do. The problem with the story and character is that everybody wants Dracula dead but the character itself is doing absolutely nothing evil. The way I see it; if they just left him alone, he would have bothered absolutely nobody and everyone would have lived happily ever after, coinciding with each other. That Lucian character, who is supposed to be a 'hero' and one of the good guys in this, is actually a bigger scoundrel and villain in my eyes, since he steals and kills for his own benefit and without any hesitations.
Since this movie isn't really about the vampire Dracula, that means that this movie is also stripped from all of its horror themes and it's giving absolutely nothing else in return. Guess it's trying to be an action/fantasy/adventure movie but the movie has a far too low budget for it to ever work out. The action is nothing exciting and all of the fantasy and adventure elements are far too formulaic and predictable, mostly due to the fact that this movie 'borrows' heavily from other genre movies. Because of its approach, the Dracula character himself also gets pushed to the background and actually becomes a very boring, lifeless, character.The story never manages to become an interesting or engaging one with anything and it's constantly lacking a good build up. The whole Dracula and Alina romance for instance is annoyingly bad and unconvincing. A lot of the changes that were made to the story don't make that much sense to me either. So Renfield sort of is Dracula's right-hand man, who also lives at his castle with him. OK that's all fine but the problem is that Renfield suddenly is supposed to be a native Romanian as well in this story. A native Romanian named Renfield, in the 19th century, or whenever this movie is supposed to be set? Seriously what were they thinking? And it's not like this movie isn't taking the liberty to change any of the other character's names to fit its Romanian settings. But why change Van Helsing as well and name him Leonardo instead of Abraham? It's all so very inconsistent, the way how the movies treats its characters and changes some and some of their names. It serves absolutely no purpose for the story, often makes no sense at all and adds absolutely nothing.
It's a very pointless movie that isn't ever doing anything interesting but besides is a very poorly done movie as well. It's a bland movie, with some bad storytelling and character development, combined with some simplistic dialog and an overall cheap look. There is just absolutely nothing remotely good or decent about this movie and it actually is worse to watch than most of the bad Dracula adaptations that I have seen.
3/10
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