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80This creature feature is exhilarating fun, a richly designed and often quite funny re-exploration of the movie past.
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80This beast is as subtle as a Red Bull enema, but it succeeds magnificently as compulsively watchable spectacle.
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75Silly and spectacular, and fun.
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75A movie that's underwritten, overdirected, overproduced and almost constantly over-the-top. But it's also, at its best, a big tongue-in-cheek extravaganza.
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63For all its tangle of characters and plot twists, Van Helsing isn't the slightest bit involving, and more than once (especially whenever Beckinsale is onscreen), it is unintentionally hilarious. But it's the rare kind of movie where the badness just adds to the fun.
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63There is fun to be had at Van Helsing, but it requires considerable suspension of disbelief at the apparently deliberately ridiculous plot necessary to bring the three monsters together.
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63Horror classicists may be upset at his tampering with monster mythologies, but everyone else will just be going along for the ride, and they’ll have a terrific time.
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60The sense of evil overkill is entirely representative of the picture itself, which repeatedly looks ready to blow all its fuses due to sensory overload.
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50Old monster movies were thrilling in a way that mingled terror, sexuality and a real preference for the monsters over their tormentors. Van Helsing is a kiddie adventure on an endless, meaningless loop.
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50The dashing Jackman plays his part well enough, but the script doesn't provide sufficient "Indiana Jones"-style bons mots to win us over.
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50Universal Studios has unloaded its entire monster catalog in this movie, which is aimed at people with the attention span of a kindergartner. Shreds of coherence and character have been sacrificed to fangs and fisticuffs at every chance.
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50A hokey monster mish-mash that plunders the richly textured histories of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster.
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50Kind of like a basketball team of all-stars -- no names, please -- that has difficulty jelling into one smooth and efficient unit.
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50Despite the rococo obsessiveness of its special effects and its voracious sampling of past horror movies, Van Helsing is mostly content to offer warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills.
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50The effect for viewers is that of having inserted one's head in a kettledrum that is being pounded on by drunken monkeys.
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If an eardrum-damaging score and people getting routinely slammed into stone walls at a 100 miles an hour without so much as chipping a tooth is your idea of a good time, then Van Helsing won't disappoint.
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42A monstrous disappointment.
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40The result reaches overload very quickly, squandering the potentially cool premise in a headlong assault of set-piece over story.
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40Van Helsing is simply far too much of a good thing, and although Hensley's Frankenstein Monster comes off better than anyone else, the film suffers from some truly inane dialogue and pacing that will likely cause tachycardia in members of the audience old enough to recall who Dwight Frye was.
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40Van Helsing wears its price tag on its ruffled lamé sleeve. And yet it gives off an aura of what I can only call lavish cheapness.
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40It's all cliffhangers, with no downtime in between.
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40The horror flick, at its height, was a lyrical caressing of our fears; by the end of this nonsense, you fear for the well-being of the genre. “It’s dead!” [24 May 2004, p. 96]
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38Instead of paying homage to these creepy creatures of bygone Hollywood, Sommers seems to be unwittingly lampooning them. The first few minutes of Van Helsing, shot in black and white, look like outtakes from Mel Brooks' gagfest "Young Frankenstein."
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38We haven't had a good Frankenstein, Dracula, or Wolf Man movie in a long time, so here's one where the whole gang shows up. One catch: It's not good.
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38The biggest crime of Van Helsing is that it resurrects classic monsters and fails to make them scary. With a full 132 minutes of feeble jokes and gimcrack phantasmagoria, it's not spine-tingling - it's butt-numbing.
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33Van Helsing, a fusion of eye candy and brain sputter, is a long, kinetic, yet dreary mess.
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30In Van Helsing, the orgy of morphing, shrieking, lightning-cracking, and habitual rope-swinging quickly turns oppressive.
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30A special-effects extravaganza that uses the barest of excuses to bring these characters together.
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30The road of excess leads to the palace of boredom in this overblown monster epic.
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25Here's a shrieking bore of a horror flick.
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25In sum, Van Helsing is yet another video game disguised as a wide-screen epic. Here's hoping the box office drives a firm wooden stake through its hokey Hollywood heart.
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25To be fair, the movie is nothing if not consistent -- the idea is every bit as dumb as the execution.
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20Sommers suspends the laws of time and physics and forces his characters to spout some of the cheesiest dialogue imaginable.
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20You have to feel for the army of talented FX people who must have spent months on scenes--trying to compensate, with their artistry, for the lack of dramatic logic--and having to listen to those lines over and over.
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12There are quite a few unintentionally funny moments, although the overall experience was too intensely painful for me to be able to advocate it as being "so bad, it's good."
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10A work of staggering stupidity.
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0Sommers film just lies there, weighted down by a complete lack of wit, artfulness and internal logic. So it's a disaster -- a big, loud, boring wreck.
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0Nothing's alive in this trash-heap travesty of warm-weather entertainment, despite the frenetic pace.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 44 out of 113
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Mixed: 20 out of 113
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Negative: 49 out of 113
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"Van Helsing" consists only action and great visuals. But a good movie is a lot more than just that.
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10