Dracula Untold

The original plan was to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, but since one of our party couldn’t make it we decided to leave that for next time and see something else. There were no convenient showings of The Maze Runner, so we opted for this. Went in expecting cheesy dreck, and that’s what we got, so no complaints here.

Dracula Untold is basically taking the now-familiar premise of Wicked and Maleficent and applying it to a gothic horror character rather than a fairy tale bad guy. We see Dracula’s origin story, and why he’s not such a bad sort after all. The main problems with this is that in going back to Stoker’s origin for his name, the film goes for the rather more problematic option of attempting to rehabilitate Vlad the Impaler, and disappointingly totally ignores the Victorian setting of the novel.

So we get a story set in the time of Vlad Tepes, mid 15^th-century Wallachia. Historical accuracy is dispensed with: Vlad’s brother disappears, as do all the warlords’ various allies and armies, so that essentially Romania is one fortified city and a monastery. The nasty bullying Turks of the Ottoman Empire hold uncontested dominion over the region, but when Vlad was a child, his father gave him up to be trained into a mindless killing machine, a fanciful version of the political hostage situation of history. Vlad became a nasty killer, murdering a whole village, but has now settled down to become a likeable family man – but here is the first big problem of the film. It wants us to just shrug off Vlad brutally killing a whole village of innocents because he thinks it probably saved ten times the number he killed thanks to making him fearsome. And we’re supposed to accept that and like him because we don’t really get any human perspective on his mass murder. Huh.

Well, the nasty Sultan comes to take more of the kingdom’s boys, including Vlad’s son, so he starts a war he can’t win. Unless, of course, he goes into the mysterious cave on the mountain where a cursed being lives and sells his soul...

The rest is pretty predictable. Lots of battles and the chance for Vlad to save his soul, which he gives up for his loved ones. There’s a lot of bad writing...we’re supposed to accept that he has incredible powers of observation, able to hear the spiders on their webs over the rush of the river, but he fails to notice the Sultan hiding or that his wife is about to fall from a cliff. Silver is presented as a kind of kyrptonite for vampires, but Vlad chooses to have a fight surrounded by it instead of, y’know, exiting the tent and using his ‘strength of ten men’ and super-hearing to just spear his opponent.

The casting is also amusing, coming across like a strange Game of Thrones alternate universe fanfiction. The original vampire is Charles Dance, having fun hamming things up with a mouthful of false teeth, while the son is Rickon Stark and Thoros of Myr shows up as a monk. Meanwhile, the Sultan Mehmed is amusingly played by Dominic Cooper exactly as he played Uday Hussein. Vlad himself has been in the Hobbit films, making for an amusing mish-mash of familiar faces.

But ultimately I don’t want to be too harsh on Dracula Untold, because I never expected it to be any better than it was, because the costumes are gorgeous and because the actors are actually being very sincere.