Evgeny Kogan. Do it yourself!

150 million dollars budget, computer effects and beautiful actors, the color and sexuality of a vampire movie... The plans include the creation of a television series, a computer game and, it seems, a wax figure and a fashionable clothing line... No, honestly, it should have worked out if not A masterpiece, it is certainly an outstanding film. After all, they were waiting for him...

In Transylvania, evil rules the world. Evil is, naturally, Count Dracula (who does not disdain cheap theatrical effects), his three brides (in human form they are very good, but in the form of Valkyries - both scary and not made up), Doctor Frankenstein (who, at the whim of Dracula, ended up in Romania, where he works, again on the order of the count, on his monster), a werewolf (who was once a cool guy, the brother of a beautiful princess and, part-time, a gypsy), a bunch of some kind of wickedness. The people in Transylvania, by the way, are also not very nice - they all have axes at the ready, and they try to hit strangers in the eye. The people are ruled by an undertaker with such a look that it is better not to catch his eye. Next is the already mentioned beautiful princess, who, for reasons beyond understanding, is hunted by Dracula. And, in fact, that’s all. And so, into this very den of horror, on the orders of a secret inter-confessional, but located in the Vatican, order arrives Gabriel Van Helsing - a legendary fighter against all sorts of infernal villains, wanted throughout the world as a malicious killer and generally a decent bastard. Along with him is his assistant, who understands chemistry, physics, magic and Latin and, if necessary, shows miracles of courage. Good forces enter into an unequal battle with the forces of evil and, as expected, win. Although they suffer losses, along the way they also find out the unpleasant details of their mysterious past. Uff...

Naturally, you shouldn’t expect much intellectual depth from a vampire action movie, stuffed to the gills with very high-quality special effects (the budget is one and a half hundred million dollars, after all). It is also clear that one should not expect rigid logic from a film where Van Helsing, who in Bram Stoker’s creation was an elderly professor named Abraham, here appears in the form of an unshaven macho ( Hugh Jackman ), and Dr. Frankenstein creates his own terrible, but kind face inside a monster in Transylvania. But the sloppiness with which Van Helsing was filmed is amazing. The trouble is not even that the corseted beauty ( Kate Beckinsale ), who had just been thrown out of the window into the street by a Valkyrie, in the next frame again suffers from the tortures of the same Valkyrie. The trouble is different - the episodes that make up the film are connected into a single whole purely nominally. There is no logic in the plot itself, and one gets the feeling that the film had no script at all, but only a set of gags, sometimes witty dialogues and high-quality action scenes. In this case, the film turns out to be akin to a construction kit from the “Do It Yourself” series: you are given a bunch of “cubes”, and you, knowing approximately what should happen in the end, assemble something from these “cubes” yourself, guided by poorly written instructions. Hence, for example, numerous plot inconsistencies. And the abundance of characters who, as a result, turn out to be superfluous. For example, the very memorable undertaker mentioned at the beginning of the article - for half the film you expect that now he will surprise everyone, now he will turn, if not into a vampire, then at least into a little ghost from Vazastan. But no, he will simply die an inglorious death, like many others, and will merge with the crowd. It's a shame as hell.

It's surprising that the author of the enchanting "The Mummy" Stephen Sommers turned out to be "Van Helsing" - a film that is not only illogical, but also categorically not witty. Yes, when Van Helsing is given a weapon in a secret laboratory, this directly refers to James Bond . Yes, the beautiful gypsy girl in the finale suddenly begins to speak in quotes from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . This doesn't save the picture. And who Van Helsing turns out to be in the end - it was impossible to imagine even in a nightmare...

Although the film will certainly do well at the box office. But, probably, someday that blessed time will come when viewers, even those who came to the cinema for entertainment and farce, will demand at least the rudiments of logic from scriptwriters, directors, and producers. And then the film "Troy" , the next high-profile premiere in Russian distribution, they say, begins with the title "3 thousand years ago." Cool, yeah?