DRACULA
Starring: Caleb Landry Jones, Christoph Waltz, Zoë Bleu, Guillaume de Tonquédec, Matilda De Angelis, and Ewens Abid
Director: Luc Besson
KATIE
Dracula is an irresistibly overdone treat. It’s visually stunning, full of rich, detailed, and lavish costuming and set design, as well as gorgeous cinematography. It’s theatrical in the best way, especially some very entertaining dance set pieces. Some aspects of the story are ridiculously silly, but this lends itself to the grandiose tone and unashamedly romantic take on the tale. It focuses on Dracula’s tragic love story, framing him as an empathetic, tortured soul, but it still has some moments of bloody horror. Caleb Landry Jones is enthralling in the leading role, even considering his hammy, vaguely Eastern European accent.
ADRIANO
If you’re going to tell a story that’s been told to death already, the very least you can do is introduce an engaging angle, either narratively or stylistically. There’s some of that in writer/director Luc Besson’s Dracula, but it’s all minimal and results in the same ideas of past incarnations. Beyond that, the filmmaking and writing are awkward, and the editing is choppy to the point of barely anything being comprehensible. It’s not all horrid; the production of the film itself is lavish enough to hold attention, but it’s a struggle to get through otherwise.
PAIGE
Luc Besson’s Dracula could not hold my attention in the slightest. Tonally, the film is all over the place, the pacing drags, the visuals are dingy and dull, and the editing is outright atrocious. The story doesn’t offer anything new to the lore of the famous vampire and seems unsure what type of movie it wants to be. To be frank, it felt like the poor man’s version of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker's Dracula. Even the phenomenal Christoph Waltz could not save this movie from being a complete snooze fest.
