Verdict: ☆ 1/2 _ _ _ _

Dracula rebooted! Why not? Everything else has been. Fear and horror surround history’s creepiest badass for centuries, spawning legends, stories and nightmares throughout all lands. But forget about all that! This is the Vlad you never knew, the Wallacian ruler we get to know from his wife and only son’s point of view. Who better than Luke Evans (Clash of the Titans, The Hobbit) to play that really good guy we know nothing about? Evans has that handsome face you can approach, the dashing next door neighbor with the Volvo and the Harley in the same garage. Here he looks like he just walked off the set of The Hobbit and was given the script for Dracula five minutes before the director yelled “…aaaand action!”

Wait. No makeup? What about hair? He looks like he just walked out of Lake Town and into Wallachia. That’s okay, no worries. One thing that sets Dracula apart from The Hobbit is the fact that there are no battle scenes. Oh, there are armies! The Turks attack Castle Dracula relentlessly. It’s just that Vlad has no army at all except for a few tough guys around him who stare solemnly at everything and hardly lift a sword.

Which is why Vlad decides to visit the creepy creature in a mountain nearby. Legend has it no one comes out of the creature’s cave alive. And that includes Turks, who have been seen entering the cave and not coming out. That’s good enough for Vlad! If it kills Turks, maybe he can figure out a way to use the creature. Unfortunately his plans go awry when the creature decides to use him! Bitten and becoming the Drac we all know and love to hate, Vlad then decimates the entire Turk army himself. It’s not even a contest.

Remember the scene in The Matrix Reloaded when Neo battled an army of Smiths? Yeah. Except it’s Vlad and an army of Turks. That scene alone almost made the price of a rental worth it. All in all though, the movie was pretty hum drum. This is the problem with having such cheap and readily available CGI. Instead of telling a story using CGI as a tool, CGI uses the story to advertise CGI. This movie is so chalk full of CGI from green screens to zillions of bats, it’s completely unrealistic. And no amount of CGI will help make a story deeper than it already is. The story in this CGI pool is desperately shallow, not much more than a wading pool. Sure, it’ll cool you off on a hot day, but you don’t get much exercise out of it.

Here’s a question: Why do the young sons of epic historical movie badasses all have that same, soft, compassionate, doe-eyed look as if they’d never seen a sword in their life and spend their off hours away from lessons caring for baby rabbits? Here’s side by side of the sons of Vlad from Dracula and the son of Maximus from Gladiator: