Renzo's Rant

The purpose of a movie trailer is always to try to impress you with the best that the movie has to offer. The trailer gets all the best explosions, the best one-liners, and the best shocks. It sometimes lists past credentials of the star/director/ producer/boom operator in an attempt to trick you into saying "Hey, Schindler's List was a great movie, and since the same boom operator worked on the new Idle Hands sequel, it must by extension also be great!" Thus, it was a bad sign for Van Helsing when the most impressive credentials they could find to put in the trailer were "From the director of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns!" Are they just masochistic, or did they actually think that being the director of The Mummy Returns was a positive selling point? And apparently the Mummy franchise is the best that Stephen Sommers has to offer; it seems like saying "From the director of [Insert crappy movie here] and [Insert even crappier sequel to crappy movie here]!"

By now you're probably wondering why I'm writing about Van Helsing almost 5 months after it opened. Well, I actually started this article before going on my summer hiatus, and it sat there, unfinished, until I came back to finish it. Which I am doing now. If you don't like it, you can go suck a lemon. Now, when I watched Van Helsing, I got the strange feeling that I'd seen it before. Not the actual movie itself, that is, but it seemed to have certain elements that were eerily familiar. And then I realised what it was: the plot is just a rehashing of the two stars' previous movies. That's right, Mr. Sommers just took a crash course on the stories of X-Men and Underworld, and grafted them onto Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale's characters. Don't believe me? Check out the following charts:

Van Helsing Vs. X-Men

Van Helsing	Hugh Jackman stars as a super-hero with super-human abilities.	Hugh Jackman's character can't remember his past, but he's been around for centuries.	Hugh Jackman's character has some past connection with the bad guy, but he decides not to find out what it is.
X-Men	Hugh Jackman stars as a super-hero with super-human abilities.	Hugh Jackman's character can't remember his past, but he's been around for centuries.	Hugh Jackman's character has some past connection with the bad guy, but he decides not to find out what it is.

Van Helsing Vs. Underworld

Van Helsing	Kate Beckinsale stars as a member of a family that has fought the same group of enemies for centuries.	Kate Beckinsale's character is involved with a conflict between werewolves and vampires.	Kate Beckinsale's brother becomes a werewolf, and she must choose whether or not to kill him.
Underworld	Kate Beckinsale stars as a member of a family that has fought the same group of enemies for centuries.	Kate Beckinsale's character is involved with a conflict between werewolves and vampires.	Kate Beckinsale's boyfriend becomes a werewolf, and she must choose whether or not to kill him.

Hmmm...seems a bit too much to write off as coincidence. They might as well have been honest and just announced it from the beginning, like this:

But enough of that, onto the real review. It's your typical brainless action movie, with cheesy sequences and special effects, and even cheesier dialogue. Get a load of these gems!