In Stephen (The Mummy) Sommers' latest action horror hybrid, Hugh Jackman (known to pretty much everyone as Wolverine from the X-Men films) plays the title role of Van Helsing. While the name may conjure up fond memories of gothic horror and creaky cobwebbed crypts, Sommers ensures that his revamp of the character has less to do with Edward Von Sloan and Peter Cushing and more to do with James Bond.

Set against a backdrop of late 1800s Europe, Van Helsing is an agent of the Catholic Church whose mission is to fight evil and take down monsters. Why does he do this? Because at some point he lost his memory and wound up on the doorstep of a church where the took him in and turned him into the fighting machine that he is today, complete with his own version of Q named Carl (David Wenham) to provide some very unnecessary comic relief.

When the Catholic Church finds out that Dracula (Richard Roxburgh, sporting an unintentionally hilarious accent) is trying to pick up where the late Dr. Frankenstein left off, they send Van Helsing to Romania where he teams up with a buxom gal named Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale, who looks great in a corset for some reason) to stop Dracula and attempt to save her brother, who happens to have been bitten by and subsequently turned into a werewolf not too long ago. Unfortunately for our heroes, Dracula has a whole lot of evil doers on his side in the form of some scantily clad vampire brides, a werewolf or two, and if all goes as planned, Frankenstein's monster.

It should go without saying that being familiar with and even having enjoyed on a very base level some of Sommers' earlier efforts that I knew this movie would be full of CGI. Now I have mixed emotions on the format – sometimes it can really enhance a movie and allow for effects to happen that would otherwise be pretty near impossible. The Lord Of The Rings films are good examples of this. Other times, CGI can be so blatantly obvious that it sucks you right out of the film and ruins whatever atmosphere might have been there in the first place. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a good example of this. Van Helsing falls somewhere in the middle in this regard – some of the effects are a little obvious, some of them work. The sets look fantastic and some of the creatures look really good – but others don't look quite as natural as they need to and kinda sorta look a wee bit phony.

But the problem with Van Helsing does not lie with the abundant use of CGI.

Van Helsing fails before it even gets to the visuals department. In fact, the movie looks pretty good for what it is. Where the real weakness lies is in the script. Now I realize that the demographic that this movie was going for was probably kids and pre-teens but come on, could the dialogue have been anymore painful to sit through or completely and utterly predictable? I honestly don't think that it could have been. Given the fact that we get almost zero background information on the lead characters it's hard to care for them in the least, and the relationship between Anna and Van Helsing happens so quickly that you know how it's all going to end and nothing comes as a surprise at all. With that in hand, the movie ends up a bore. With no suspense and no characters to care about, how else could it have turned out?

The movie looks interesting and the set design is absolutely fantastic but neither this nor the non-stop action that the film delivers are enough to carry a story that delivers nothing and performances that almost define clichéd. I found myself finishing lines of dialogue for the characters, it was just that easy to see it coming.

Video:

Well, those who enjoyed the movie should be pretty pleased with the snappy looking 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that Universal has give Van Helsing. While the high level of clarity present from start to finish does make some of the computer generated effects more obvious, the colors are rich and supple and the ever important black levels remain strong and deep without showing any evidence of compression – which is a big deal considering how much of this movie takes place at night and/or in dark rooms, caverns, laboratories, et cetera. Pay attention during some of the more difficult scenes involving smoke, cobwebs, snow, and water and you'll notice that they're rendered near perfectly and don't show obvious digital flaws like many transfers do. The amount of detail crammed into this transfer combined with nicely rendered transfer, the totally over the top visuals and set design ensure that Van Helsing looks terrific on this DVD presentation.