Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kai Lord" data-source="post: 1536688" data-attributes="member: 3570">I'm not going to list them all because there's too many, but suffice it to say that the action, characters, stunts, visual effects, plot, and style of Van Helsing were all much better than The Mummy.  If I watched them back to back (and I won't, I saw The Mummy once in the theaters five years ago and bits and pieces later on TNT), then I imagine little things for an action spectacle like acting and script would come out in Van Helsing's favor as well.You don't judge a popcorn action spectacle by how often the lead actress nails a foreign accent or how deeply the hero manifests the inner subtext of childhood scars the viewer will never know or care about, you judge them by how fun they are.Sure its nice when every element of filmmaking and storytelling is brought together into an almost perfection manifestation of the art form, because when that happens you get Raiders of the Lost Ark.  So neither Van Helsing nor The Mummy was Raiders.  Okay, fair enough, not every adventure film will be.But were they fun?  Van Helsing, hell yeah.  Jackman is charismatic, Beckinsale is beautiful and coy, Wolfmen, Dracula, Frankenstein, super crossbows and Transylvania are just freaking cool.  And the presentation of those elements was engaging and proficient enough to keep it immensely entertaining.Werewolves are cooler than mummies.  Dracula is cooler than mummies.  Frankenstein is cooler than mummies.  Combining werewolves, Dracula, and Frankenstein is cooler than combing a mummy, badly rendered beetles, and a sandstorm.Combine the much weaker elements of The Mummy with a freaking Jar Jar Binks character and you get one lame ass adventure film.  Face it, the effects *sucked* in the Mummy, the characters were totally unengaging, and when boring characters are chased by really, really bad CGI, you don't get very thrilling action sequences.And when those elements are lacking, what's the point of even sitting through it?  The "performances, script, and direction"?  Who cares?  If I want to watch amazing performances there are hundreds of finely acted films that *don't* have legions of crappy looking beetles and the Deuce Bigalow guy running around saying, "It is written...it is written..."But if I want to watch a cool hero and a sexy heroine fighting classic monsters that are often times very convincingly rendered in a wall to wall action extravaganza, well then I'm going to choose a movie that actually has a cool hero, a sexy heroine, and sweet looking classic monsters and fight scenes.  Van Helsing has all the above, and The Mummy has Rachel Weisz.  No contest.</blockquote>

Verification