Dracula Retold

Like http://www.moviesaccordingtodave.blogspot.com/2014/06/once-upon-time.html, ‘Vlad the Impaler’ had gotten a bad rap throughout history and the record needs to be set straight.  So Legendary Pictures and director Gary Shore give us ‘Dracula Untold,’ a revisionist take on Vlad Tepes, the 15th Century prince of Wallachia renowned for his cruelty and predilection to impale his enemies upon stakes in order to strike fear into people's hearts. Although there was no evidence that Vlad was ever a blood-sucking vampire, the House Draculesti (of which he was a member) was associated with vampires by Bram Stoker in his seminal 1897 novel.

 

Played with great sympathy and humanity by The Hobbit’s Luke Evans, we come to see Vlad not as a bloodthirsty tyrant but as a great warrior, a fair and just ruler as well as a loving father and husband forced to defend his family and kingdom against the sultan of the Turks, who wanted to impress (as in forcibly kidnap) all the boys in Transylvania to swell the ranks of a future army of conquest.  Couched as a tale of freedom versus oppression, ‘Dracula Untold’ is simply another been-there-done-that spin on a well used theme, with only superficial window dressing applied to make it ‘stand out’ from the rest.

 

Toothless (pun intended), predictable and unimaginative, ‘Dracula Untold’ is just another dark fantasy to tide us over while we impatiently await the next Hobbit installment.  Perhaps the biggest irony of ‘Dracula Untold’ is the fact that not one drop of blood (CGI or otherwise) was spilled in the movie’s many sterile battle scenes in which Vlad tore through the Turks in fits of berserker rage, no doubt for the sake of earning its tame PG-13 rating.

 

Grade: C