I don’t think this is quite what Mary Shelley was going for when she wrote of her modern Prometheus in 1818: flying stone gargoyles, snarling demons who burst into flaming fireballs, sword-waving “Clash of the Titans” rejects and a Frankenstein’s monster courtesy of Abercrombie & Fitch. As if poor Mary hadn’t spun in her grave enough times since her death in 1851, here stomps “I, Frankenstein,” which has scarred but boltless hottie Aaron Eckhart doing battle, Van Helsing style, with the computer-generated forces of darkness. In fact, the sheer, record-smashing velocity of Shelley’s coffin-spinning in response to “I, Frankenstein” ought to be enough to reanimate her corpse, which is good because it means if we dig her up she can greet director Stuart Beattie in person and then give him a good hard kick up the backside.
This dark and murky comic-book actioner, based on Kevin Grevioux’s graphic novel, reimagines Shelley’s creature as a brooding, undead anti-hero stuck in the middle of an ancient war fought between evil demons and angelic gargoyles (don't ask). For over two centuries, Frankenstein’s monster, renamed Adam by his gargoyle buddies, is hunted by hellspawn who promptly get their demonic asses handed to them. A howlingly miscast Bill Nighy is the head of the demons, the tea-sippingly sinister Prince Naberius, who seeks the unholy secrets hidden in the pages of Dr. Frankenstein’s scientific journal so that he may make his own monsters and doom mankind, or something.
The stench of “Van Helsing” is strong with this one, from the incomprehensible, bonkers plot to the dreary exposition to the eye-watering CGI overkill — actually, the only thing that worked in favour of Stephen Sommers’ bum-brained 2004 blockbuster is cripplingly absent here: a sense of humour. Maybe it could’ve worked as one of those goofy old Universal monster movie sequels, like “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” or “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” — as this deadly serious “Underworld” knock-off, it’s a butt-numbing, headachey bore. I have no doubt that Grevioux’s original comic is lots of fun, but such an outlandish premise is easy to embrace in comic book form: it's all cartoon characters and speech bubbles, after all. Watching real life human beings doing what they do and indeed saying what they say in “I, Frankenstein,” and with such grim expressions slapped onto their faces, the only reasonable response is, “This is dumb and boring and I want my money back.”
Rating: 2/10
Ouch! For a second I thought this movie looked mildly entertaining, now not so much. Thanks for the warning!
ReplyDelete