Bram Stoker's Dracula

Gary Oldman is repulsive and attractive at the same time, which is a remarkable feat of theatrics that any vampire would be proud of. Anthony Hopkins is excellent as usual, but seems to know, deep down, that he and Oldman are the only members of the cast taking this thing seriously.

Unfortunately, everything else undermines whatever good the creepily excellent special effects or Gary Oldman could have done. The plot veers bizarrely away from the original story, but instead of hightening the interest in the characters, it diminishes it.

You could care less about Lucy and Mina, who are both stupid and oversexed and don't seem to have motives for anything they do. Winona Ryder just doesn't do anything for me. (You spend a good deal of the film wondering why the heck she's with Keanu Reeves!)

The guy who plays Renfield is creepy and wonderful, but the movie doesn't really establish him like the book does, and if you don't know the book well, you're likely to become confused.

Oldman creates an amazingly sympathetic Dracula, despite all of these awful plot problems. The choice to make Mina a sort of reincarnation of his dead long-lost love was probably a bad one. It confuses the original issues and makes Dracula more of a Lloyd-Webber-Phantom-Adaptation-Character than anything else.

Keanu Reeves proves in this movie, more than in any other, just what a terrible actor he is. It's amazing that this guy, who has apparently no redeeming dramatic qualities, continues to remain popular. Everyone seems to agree that he stinks. Maybe we just like feeling superior to movie stars now and then. I, on the other hand, think that we could easily have foregone Reeves' insipid, bland, exhausting Jonathan Harker quite easily. And what kind of accent is he trying to DO, anyway? Does he actually think that's a BRITISH accent?!

So the plot (and Keanu) sucessfuly undermine this film altogether. Also, the way they adapted the book (so specifically stating that it is BRAM STOKER'S Dracula) is abridged to a fault. Instead of maintaining the integrity of a thorough adaptation by keeping the script, this watered-down version makes me long for a good script writer who had the guts to say "forget abridging something that's already good by itself. Let's just write something original and forget the book!" Unfortunately, in an attempt to follow Stoker's orginal work, this movie has destroyed it, and placed the poor author's name right there in the title for him to cringe at from beyond the grave.

It's lucky Bram Stoker didn't become a vampire, because I can think of quite a lot of people involved in this film who deserve to get bitten.