Dracula Untold (2014)

Movie Info

So…can we make a deal?

After years of fighting, Vlad Tepes (Luke Evans) has found a shaky peace with the Ottoman Empire. When tensions begin to rise and Vlad’s old ally the Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper) has plots an invasion of Europe, Vlad learns that his son (Art Parkinson) and the sons of his people are being forcefully recruited into Mehmed’s army. Desperate, Vlad turns to a source of evil hidden on the border of his country. The creature (Charles Dance) is a vampire and can provide Vlad with the power he needs to rebuke Mehmed and his army…but power comes with a price.

Directed by Gary Shore, Dracula Untold is a horror action adventure. The film adapts aspects of Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel Dracula and was met with negative reviews despite a rather strong box office. The film was going to be retroactively included in Universal’s “Dark Universe”, but the plans were cancelled.

More of this scary vampire…please?

I heard a lot of bad press about Dracula Untold (much like Tom Cruise’s The Mummy) and went into it with little hope. Due to this I was pleasantly surprised that the film wasn’t a dumpster fire…while it wasn’t great, it wasn’t that bad either.

The story actually is more developed than I thought it would be. The film goes into Dracula’s origin and has him choosing his destiny to protect his family…after he decides there are no other options. It plays with the vampire mythology a bit (the whole “three days” of being a part vampire was different), and the story does corrode as it goes on. It progresses to where you expect it to and the last act of the film feels a bit like a mess as a result…it just seems like it was a better film than to end in a lame fight.

Luke Evans is surprisingly effective in the role of Vlad. He is sympathetic and does keep the movie going. I like the creepy Charles Dance vampire and wish that his character had been more incorporated into the story (if the story had continued, it appears he would have been). I wasn’t a fan of Dominic Cooper’s Mehmed who was a very cliché character with little depth.

I can’t wait for the sequels…oh crap

The visuals of the film were on the “too dark” side. It was sometimes difficult to see the action going on, and the film primarily evolves into an action film for the last act. It also becomes a special effects explosion as Vlad adjusts to his powers. If the tone had been more horror based throughout the film, I feel that the last part of the movie might have worked better.

Dracula Untold isn’t a very good movie, but it is better than it is made out to be. The “Dark Universe” seems to be a bit of a bust with the failure of The Mummy and since this film was not included with that film, the franchise doesn’t look promising. There are a lot of vampire movies out there, and Dracula Untold is just another one of them…it just happened to be on the verge of being more.

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The Mummy (2017)