THE STORY – When a 15th-century prince denounces God after the devastating loss of his wife, he inherits an eternal curse and becomes Dracula. Condemned to wander the centuries, he defies fate and death, guided by the hope of being reunited with his lost love.
THE CAST – Caleb Landry Jones, Christoph Waltz, Zoë Bleu, Matilda De Angelis, Ewens Abid, Guillaume de Tonquédec & David Shields
THE TEAM – Luc Besson (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 129 Minutes
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula” has been one of cinema’s favorite books to adapt (practically since its inception), so if you’re going to do so again, you’d better make it unique. French cinema’s foremost maximalist, Luc Besson, has certainly done that with his latest version, a patently gaudy take on the oft-told tale that filters the vampire mythos through the pop auteur’s singular style.
Anyone familiar with Besson’s oeuvre, which includes wild space operas “The Fifth Element” and “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” female-led action flicks “La Femme Nikita,” “Lucy,“ and “Anna,“ and historical epics “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc“ and “The Lady,“ knows that the cinéma du look pioneer’s style essentially boils down to “things a twelve year-old boy would find cool.“ The problem is that Besson doesn’t really know what twelve-year-olds like anymore, so he’s just making movies for his twelve-year-old self. And good for him! There’s certainly no one else whose “Dracula“ would pull from influences as wide and wild as Tom Tykwer’s “Perfume,“ Ken Russell’s “The Devils,“ and Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,“ alongside nearly every other major Stoker adaptation. Unfortunately, even though Besson may find it grandly entertaining, just about everyone else will find it a nearly unwatchable, tonally inconsistent mess.
Right off the bat, it’s clear that Besson’s vision for his vampire is most aligned with that of Francis Ford Coppola, whose 1992 adaptation of Stoker’s novel emphasized the romance between the centuries-old vampire and his true love. The opening montage depicting the love between Vladimir, Count Dracula (Caleb Landry Jones), and Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu) makes it immediately clear that this will focus on romance far more than horror.
Besson’s not one for subtlety, though, and his design choices pull as directly as they can from Coppola and his collaborators without outright plagiarism. No, costume designer Corine Bruand doesn’t replicate Eiko Ishioka’s madly creative, muscle-like armor for Dracula, but the dragon-styled armor she does come up with bears a strikingly similar silhouette. Landry Jones, for whom Besson built this version of “Dracula“ after working with him on 2023’s “Dogman,“ is styled so similarly to Gary Oldman’s 1992 Dracula, especially in his oldest form, that you might even think they used the same prosthetics and hairpieces. The constant referencing of Coppola’s film goes beyond mere appreciation, to the point where you start to wonder if Besson has finally run out of ideas after forty-plus years in the business.
No such luck. Besson has plenty of ideas for his “Dracula,“ and he has put them all into the film with complete disregard for whether they make sense. He almost seems to be onto something interesting with his handling of the novel’s religious aspects. As a human, Vlad leads his army in what he believes is a holy war, killing their enemies in God’s name. Because of this, he believes that he has the right to ask God to protect Elisabeta, despite her pointedly asking him why they can’t all just live in peace, as “God has planned for us.“ Besson also comes tantalizingly close to implicating Vlad directly in Elisabeta’s death, adding depth to the character as his curse becomes a sort of self-enforced penance. However, these interesting thematic points get backgrounded in favor of the romance and some very rough-looking CGI stone gargoyle servants who serve Dracula in his castle.
Look, you can certainly make an entertaining “Dracula“ adaptation that’s over two hours (Coppola’s is only one minute shorter than Besson’s, and there’s not a single second of it that even approaches being boring), but when you spend this much time on CGI stone gargoyle “comic relief,“ you have to start asking yourself who your target audience is. If you’re making a kiddie version of “Dracula,“ then by all means, go all in on the gargoyle shenanigans. But even in a film that varies as wildly in tone as this one does, whatever humor the gargoyles are supposed to provide doesn’t work when sandwiched between the passionate romance and bloody violence. It doesn’t help that none of the film’s copious attempts at humor are all that funny to begin with. There’s something uniquely offensive about an R-rated, romance-forward “Dracula“ adaptation that includes a pint-sized CGI stone gargoyle body-slamming a French soldier like Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk did to Loki in “The Avengers.”
Elsewhere, the film’s wild shifts in tone can be fun on occasion—the flashback segment about young Dracula concocting a perfume that puts women in his thrall to help him find Elisabeta’s reincarnation is highly entertaining—but Besson has lost the tight tonal control that made his earlier films (most notably “The Fifth Element”) such a breath of fresh air. Whereas before, he would slide between different tonal registers like a master trombonist, letting every note ring out loud and clear, here he instead glides calmly over them, never fully landing in any. Despite how many wild ideas Besson puts on display, nothing in the film ever feels properly crazy. It’s almost as though Besson is finally holding something back, but he has gravely miscalculated how much he can do that while still entertaining the audience.
The actors’ attempt to split the difference between Besson’s outré style and the oddly muted tone he’s going for to varying degrees of success. Landry Jones may not quite look the part—with such limp, stringy hair framing his boyish face, he looks more like an early ’00s emo teen than a 19th-century Transylvanian lord—but he commits himself fully, eventually feeling like the only cast member who landed on the exact tone Besson wanted. Bleu’s heavy-lidded eyes and flat affect often give the impression that she’s sleepwalking through the film. Still, when she meets Dracula as Mina Murray and slowly begins to remember her past life as Elisabeta, she blossoms into a full range of emotion, as though she has finally woken from a dream.
She certainly puts more effort into her performance in the film’s third act than Christoph Waltz does throughout the entire film as the unnamed Priest who fills the Van Helsing role. Waltz looks like he’s bored with playing the same part over and over, and why shouldn’t he be? Ever since his Oscar-winning breakthrough in “Inglourious Basterds,” he’s played increasingly lesser versions of Hans Landa, culminating here. If this is the final nail in the coffin of “The Christoph Waltz Type,“ then so be it. The tossed-off asides don’t land; the fussy mannerisms and bits of actorly “business“ feel more put-on than ever; and his chipper way of delivering bad news now feels grating instead of invigorating.
On the opposite side of things is Matilda de Angelis as Maria, a hybrid of Stoker’s Lucy and Renfield. Not only is she having infectious fun as a vampiress tasked with finding Dracula’s long-lost Elisabeta and bringing her to him, but she’s also bringing exactly the kind of over-the-top personality you’d expect from a Besson film.
“Dracula“ could have used more of that gonzo, anything-goes energy. As it is, this “Dracula“ feels like it’s going through the motions; a pale imitation of other, better versions of the same story. Unwilling to fully commit to his wildest ideas in favor of focusing solely on a romance that isn’t strong enough on its own to power a full feature, Besson has finally made a film that truly feels dead on arrival.
