OVERVIEW
The 1897 novel Dracula, written by Bram Stoker, gets another cinematic treatment. The Count is back, and so are most of the familiar plot beats, but this time with a bigger focus on his own backstory. The movie opens with a 1480 prologue in which Prince Vlad loses the love of his life, Elisabeta, rejects God, and is cursed, then spends centuries hoping for her return. It is a more romantic and overall sillier take on the concept, complete with some very 2000s CGI gargoyles and, somehow, a synchronized group dance sequence.
BACKGROUND
Luc Besson needed Dracula to be a huge win. The late 2010s were rough for the director after the box-office stumble of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and, especially, the wave of sexual misconduct allegations during the #MeToo movement, which left him stuck in director jail for a couple of years. His most notable recent bounce-back project was DogMan, his first collaboration with Caleb Landry Jones, an actor with real prestige on his resume, including the Cannes Best Actor prize for Nitram. Besson said he did not set out to make Dracula so much as to make another movie with Jones, and Dracula became the vehicle. Using his production company once again, he saw that a classic IP, loaded with gothic imagery and Jones back as the centerpiece, could be the recipe for success. He secured the money to mount it, but the result did not land like the comeback he clearly wanted.
THE REVIEW
If you are a director who once had real success and your name is not Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, chances are you eventually hit a phase where your movies start to feel oddly out of time. Not old-school, not retro fun, but awkward and old-fashioned. It happened to Brian De Palma in the 2010s, to Francis Ford Coppola with the Megalopolis stumble, and more recently to James L. Brooks with Ella McCay. Well, Dracula is that project for Luc Besson.
You can see a few touches of what once worked for the director, especially when the movie embraces the campy fun of the concept. A dance sequence in the middle of the film, in particular, that was temp-tracked with a Billie Eilish song, could have been memorable if it was not surrounded by a confused film that does not hit the emotions it is striving for.
According to the director, composer Danny Elfman truly nailed the tone he was going for, so I take it Besson was trying to make a tragic, gothic melodrama, in the same way Guillermo del Toro is aiming for with Frankenstein. It is hard to tell otherwise, since the movie keeps trying to be scary, campy, and serious, and those tones crash into each other. Each actor plays as if they are in a different movie, and if it was not for Elfman trying to stitch it all together, the tonal whiplash would have been a full disaster.
Like Megalopolis, cool visual ideas get undone by clunky effects and odd framing. The gargoyles in particular remind you of the early 2000s, when CGI was still finding its footing, a period that gave us “gems” like The Scorpion King in The Mummy movies. It becomes hard to stay immersed in Landry Jones’ deeply committed performance when he is surrounded by an uncanny-valley castle, which also makes the practical prosthetics look weirdly fake and out of place.
What makes this Dracula adaptation stand out from the rest is how it explores the Count’s backstory, even showing him as a normal human being 400 years before the story we are used to. I am all for showing empathy for the monster, but for us to truly buy into what made a figure like Dracula full of mysticism and mystery, the reasoning needs to be substantial. It is, obviously, a doomed romance, one that recalls Braveheart, but without the instant chemistry that film has, the kind that makes the tragedy earn its epic scale.
It all ends up rather boring. There is little heat in the romance, no heavy atmosphere to leave us uneasy, and because it is often not clear what we are supposed to feel about Dracula, it becomes easy to grow largely uninterested in all of it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Luc Besson’s attempt to return to the spotlight lands as awkwardly as Coppola’s Megalopolis, where weak visual effects and conflicting tones work against any grace and class Caleb Landry Jones is trying to bring to the material. The main romance lacks spark, and the atmosphere never makes us uneasy, resulting in an admittedly well-mounted but weirdly boring adaptation that does not achieve what it sets out to do.
Still courtesy of Game Theory Films
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- Where to watch
- Rent or buy at Apple TV Store, Amazon Video
- Where to watch
Globoplay
Telecine
Play trailer
- Original title
- Dracula
- Director
- Luc Besson
- Cast
- Caleb Landry Jones, Zoë Bleu Sidel, Christoph Waltz, Matilda De Angelis, Ewens Abid, Guillaume de Tonquédec, David Shields, Bertrand-Xavier Corbi
- Rated
- 14A
- Screenwriter
- Luc Besson, Eric Gandois
- Composer
- Danny Elfman
- Cinematography
- Colin Wandersman, Dylan Doyle
- Editor
- Lucas Fabiani
- Country
- Language
- French
- Budget
- $52 million
- Box office
- $42.415 million
- Distributor (CA)
- Game Theory Films