Vlad the Bad transformed into boring Vlad the Blah

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This article was published 10/10/2014 (4063 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DRACULA Untold aspires to link Bram Stoker’s fictional, bloodsucking ºber-vampire with the non-fictional historical figure of Vlad Tepes, a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, a 15th-century prince who is said to have dined among “forests” of his enemies, all impaled on long stakes.

Untold? As a matter of fact, this story of Dracula has been essayed before… in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 goth-o-rama Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The prelude of that film — not an invention of Stoker — showed Gary Oldman’s Wallachian prince Vlad arriving home from a busy day of impaling Turks to discover his wife has committed suicide after hearing a false rumour of his death. The raging Vlad renounces God and essentially commits himself to the powers of darkness. Nice and neat.

This movie from first-time feature director Gary Shore ventures further afield from that easily encapsulated premise with something more complicated and, if you can say this in the context of a vampire movie, far-fetched.

Meet Vlad the Impaler, nice guy and family man, just trying to do his best, darn it. Luke Evans plays him as a noble trying to put all that unpleasant impaling business, ahem, behind him. Let’s attribute it to his formative years as a conscripted child soldier under the influence of the beastly Ottoman Empire.

Vlad is trying to keep his grasp on his peaceful Wallachian turf until the Turks come calling, demanding a tribute of 1,000 boys to train as soldiers, including Vlad’s own beloved son (Art Parkinson). Vlad’s former brother in arms, the fiendish Sultan Mehmed (Dominic Cooper) will not listen to Vlad’s pleas. Vlad’s wife Mirena (luminous Canadian actress Sarah Gadon) refuses to part with her son. And Vlad knows the Turks’ superior numbers spell out inevitable defeat for his own paltry army.

What’s an Impaler to do?

Well, as it happens, Vlad happens to know about a malevolent supernatural being who lives in a mountain cave. This is the Master Vampire (Charles Dance, sporting some superbly ghoulish makeup). Under a curse of his own, MV offers a deal to Vlad: he can give the Prince the powers of a vampire for three whole days; he can employ those powers to fight the Turks. At the end of that free 72-hour trial period (call now!), he can return to humanity, providing he refrains from drinking blood.

In Stoker’s time, Dracula captured the Victorian imagination as a supernatural seducer, with an attendant, crucial component of mystery. It was enough that he could transform into a wolf or a bat. No one really wanted to know how and why.

This movie, then, takes pains to answer questions nobody asked.

On the sex front, the Dracula figure here is monogamous, devoted and frankly boring.

Dracula Untold vibes more as a superhero origin story. Vlad is as delighted by his ability to turn into a cloud of bats as Peter Parker was upon his discovery he could climb walls. He kicks butt. He is the centrepiece in a vast CG landscape of armies and castles and smoking battlefields.

The superhero formula is kind of big right now, so this is the kind of studio calculation that may succeed in attracting audiences to theatres like Renfield to flies.

But for those of us with fondly chilling memories of Christopher Lee — or Gary Oldman, for that matter — a Dracula movie minus the sex and horror is best left untold.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca