Dracula 2000

Rating

Director

Patrick Lussier

Screenplay

Joel Soisson, Patrick Lussier

Length

1h 39m

Starring

Gerard Butler, Christopher Plummer, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell, Colleen Ann Fitzpatrick, Jennifer Esposito, Omar Epps, Sean Patrick Thomas, Danny Masterson, Lochlyn Munro, Tig Fong, Tony Munch, Jeri Ryan, Shane West, Nathan Fillion, Tom Kane, Jonathan Whittaker, Robert Verlaque

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
Vampires are romantic, devious creatures whose nightlife activities have been a popular staple of horror, romance and comedy films for decades. Dracula 2000 is an update of the classic story that unfortunately drives several nails into the coffin of the vampire genre.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the story of a lascivious creature of the night who travels to England in the 1920s to seek new blood. There he discovers a woman he wants to be his for eternity. Dracula 2000 updates this story by placing it in modern-day England. Matthew Van Helsing (Christopher Plummer) has captured the legendary Dracula and holds him securely in a vault below his antiquities business.

Vandals, led by Marcus (Omar Epps) and Solina (Jennifer Esposito), hoping to find hoards of treasure behind Van Helsing’s vault doors filch the steel coffin and flee to the United States. Aboard the plane, one of the thugs manages to open the musty coffin and ends up Dracula’s first victim in nearly a century.

Matthew trails the coffin to America, followed by his assistant, Simon (Jonny Lee Miller), to try and prevent a catastrophe. The rest of the film takes place in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, a place where unusual things tend to go unnoticed. The film moves traditionally for the first couple of hours, blending pointless surreal visions with annoying fight sequences.

The ending is truly unjustifiable. It removes the mythos of Dracula being Vlad the Impaler, a Romanian warlord who lost his love and forsook God. It then becomes something that’s sacrilegious, but also ridiculous. The problem is, I wouldn’t ask anyone to sit through this waste of a film to check out the ending.

Dracula 2000 is beautiful to look at, with plenty of flesh for both men and women. But the story is infinitely ridiculous. It holds promise for about the first 30 minutes, and then goes south faster than a Union army late in the U.S. civil war.

Plummer is terribly useless; Miller is handsome, but dumb; and Justine Waddell (playing Van Helsing’s daughter and Dracula’s destined love, Mary) is attractive, yet horribly out of place. The rest of the cast: Epps, Esposito, Colleen Fitzpatrick (Mary’s roommate and original novel namesake Lucy) and Jeri Ryan (Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine, playing a news reporter/ vamp) seem like refugees from a camp horror film of the sixties and seventies, delivering limited performances in their languid roles.

There are films that are appropriate, there are films that aren’t and then there’s Dracula 2000. There are so many elements that make this film a waste. From its horrendous story to its overplayed actors, this version of the Dracula story hasn’t aged well, failing to make the transition to modern-day fable. Stoker would have a heart attack if he could see this kind of destruction of his classic horror work.

Filmmakers beware: leave Dracula in its proper time period and stick to vampire comedies; a classic should never be eradicated by this sort of brutal ‘updating.’

Review Written

September 21, 2001