Is It Worth the Watch?

They tried to do it in the unfortunate Halloween franchise reboot, and they tried to do it again with 2014’s Dracula Untold. This origin story of the famous vampire commits the unforgivable sin of attempting to make one of literature’s most malevolent and heinous villains sympathetic. Dracula was never intended to be noble or to rescue an entire kingdom, he was intended to be a terrifying monster.

Clearly influenced by the Game of Thrones craze at the time it was produced, first time director Gary Shore doesn’t know if this is a horror story, an action film, a sweeping epic, or a computer generated special effects extravaganza. Consequently, it isn’t any of those things, making it tepid and wandering. What it lacks in plot, character development and subtly, it substitutes with gratuitous and repetitive battle scenes.

In the plus column, however, Luke Evans looks fantastic with his shirt off.

Is It Worth The Watch? Dracula Untold is not an awful film, it’s just not sure what it wants to be or where it wants to take its audience. If you are a Dracula completest, go for it.

2014

92 minutes

Starring – Luke Evans, Dominic Cooper, Sarah Gadon, Charles Dance

Director – Gary Shore

Screenplay – Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless