Movie Review: Dracula Untold

'Untold' the title threatens.

Now there's been a lot told about Dracula over the decades, probably more than any other fictional character, to tell the truth. So that's a pretty big claim as far as subtitles go. At least it isn't Dracula 'Revelations'.

But as far as things go, it's not a far off claim. This is a story of a human Vlad Tepes, a family man, a soldier, and a hero to his people. A story set in the time before he was Dracula.

Untold. It definitely isn't anything Stoker wrote, and not remotely historically accurate, but it does live up to the title.

Like any movie with the 'Legendary' tag. Dracula Untold starts us off with glorious vistas and amazing costumes. It looks great from the first moment. A young, still human Vlad, prince of Transylvania, is scouting with his band of merry assholes through the forests, searching for the traces of Turkish soldiers, encroaching on the peace agreed between the two countries. Vlad is handsome, sharp, dashing, and intelligent, and essentially makes a lot of the other characters irrelevant by a few paces in.. The rest of his D&D party are there to bounce of his comments and give him occasional 'my lords' but not a one of them has a strong character behind them. They are all a little Jon Snow in nature, and entirely interchangeable. They're named, but you'll forget them soon enough, like I did, so for the remainder we'll call Vlad's crew Phil, Grant and Peggy.

Vlad senses something is off when he is led to the helmet of a turkish solier, mysteriously left in the Transylvanian rivers falling from a great mountain. Vlad knows what's up, and sends Phil, Grant and Peggy back to Castle Dracula while he goes to investigate the shadowy caves atop the mountain.

Deep in a bat filled cave high in the rocks above, Vlad and some unlucky redshirts are attacked by an inhuman entity, fast and strong, and only Vlad's speed and skill leave him to escape, noticing the terrible power of the beast he fought.

It's interesting to see an origin given to Dracula himself, as usually writers use Dracula as the no-questions asked first Vampire. An origin story is hard to do with a character so seminal, and I think they do a good job in that respect. He's your usual Ned Stark type, brooding and thoughtful, but he cares about his people, and his family.

As Vlad returns to castle Dracula, we get to meet the rest of the family, the doe eyed wife he loves above all things, and his spry little son. And just as we are introduced to the life of proud rulership Vlad has, the inevitable stake is thrown into the works. A group of sinister Turks bring an ultimatem to Vlad during a feast celebrating peace. Vlad must surrender a thousand boys to the armies of the Turkish Emperor Mehmed II.

Feeling betrayed by his old brother in arms, Vlad rides to meet Mehmed and parlay for the future of his people. Now Mehmed is your standard Thulsa Doom villain. An unquestioning military leader, he's bad, he's commanding. Apart from the vaguely alluded to past fighting alongside Vlad, we never really find much more about him. When you have a character as strong and dramatic by turns as Vlad in the lead, Mehmed seems a somewhat empty antagonist by comparison.

Naturally Mehmed is unmoved by the pleas of his brother, and Vlad returns to Transylvania in disgrace, and knows he must either give up a thousand boys, or condemn his people to war and extermination.

I had a touch of trouble swallowing this plot point, really. Vlad knows that the boys in the Turkish army are treated well, and grow up talented warriors. Vlad himself proudly was one of those surrendered as a child. He knows this, and he knows surrendering those boys will continue the peace with the Turks that his people love him for establishing. He also knows that he does not have any chance of defeating the Turks in open warfare, and still Vlad goes out, brutally does away with the Turks sent to claim the boys, and starts a whole new war. Nice one Vlad.

With the armies of Mehmed approaching to tear Transylvania apart, Vlad goes to the only power he knows that can strike fear into the hearts of men, and once more ascends the mountain to meet with the dark monster that lives above.

In the darkness of the caves above, Vlad finds himself confronting the Vampire that has been killing Turkish soldiers, and has apparently been living trapped in the darkness of the caves for centuries.

The elder Vampire is a kitschy part to play, rife with monster cliches, but luckily Charles Dance is a damn fine actor, and actually is the film's highlight performance here.

He's frightening, savage, temperamental, and commanding. He hisses a story of darkness and fear to Vlad, and offers him the power to defeat the Turks if he only drinks of the blood provided.

Vlad is warned of the terrible price for such power: If he partakes of human blood at any time in the next 72 hours, the change will be permanent, and he shall forever take the elder vampire's place in the dark.

Here's where things get going, naturally.

Waking up in the rivers washing down the mountain, the newly invigorated Vlad finds himself filled with the powers of the night. He is strong, fast, and can EXPLODE INTO BATS at will. It's great fun to watch. He takes an uncharacteristic delight in it all at first, blasting through the trees of the forest as he returns to defend Castle Dracula, from the Turkish assault, already fully underway.

Now Vlad is a complete badass, now that he has his powers.

A Turkish army one thousand strong charges into battle against him, and he goes out to meet them alone. (After donning a longer coat first, naturally) As his army watch on, Vlad completely obliterates the entire force in moments without a scratch. It's a brilliant fight. The powered up Vlad just tearing into his enemies with fist and blade and bats. One guy obliterating an entire army, it's like Dynasty Warriors. It's wild. It also makes it very clear to us that he is so powerful, nothing the Turkish army can possibly do can stand in his way. Here's another plot hiccup that I personally couldn't get over. With this power at his disposal, why doesn't Vlad take it to his enemies immediately?

There is nothing to stop him flying to tear apart the Turkish forces at their heart, give Mehmed a gigantic Vampire wedgie of darkness and ending the war right then. Instead, after Phil, Grant and the rest of the Transylvanian army hilariously trundle up after the fight is finished, Vlad commands them not to question his new powers, and to evacuate Castle Dracula for a monastery in the mountains instead.

With the powers that Vlad has, of course they need a shortcoming of some sort, a weakness, and we are only presented with two of the classic vampire weaknesses here. Neither of them elements present in Stoker's work, I might add. A vulnerability to sunlight, and a sensitivity to pure silver.

The passage of day into night as the rest of the film goes on becomes a little difficult to follow, I find. Some days seem to pass in minutes, other nights seem to pass in one battle scene. The three days of Vlad's trials resisting human blood pass in a flurry, and it's easy to get a spot lost how much time has passed since his original bargain took place. Vlad is holed up in his tent while his family and the rest of his army head up to the monastery, and is absent when they are set upon by a small Turkish skirmish unit.

His Vampire senses tingling, Vlad bursts from his tent the moment sunlight fails, to rush to aid his family. As a Turkish soldier takes down Phil in brutal combat, Vlad emerges just in time to rescue his wife and son in turn, and aid his people in making it finally to the monastery. Vlad's bat form is unstoppably powerful, he surges over opponents like a wave of death, and no one can really defend against it at all. The only reason Vlad didn't arrive in time to save Phil was because he was dicking around with theatrics elsewhere in the battle. If his bat form can pick up a Turkish soldier and toss him across a battlefield, why can't he fly by and safely whisk his family away from danger in the blink of an eye?

Arriving at the monastery, Vlad holes his people up to await the inevitable assault from the main Turkish forces. Amongst the monks that were previously his dear friends, Vlad encounters the first opposition amongst his own men. It's good to see an element of this addressed, because until this scene, his newfound powers haven't really been questioned by anyone. When his oldest friend amongst the holy men notices his vulnerability to sunlight, he confronts Vlad in a tense moment and asks that Vlad allow himself to be destroyed for the good of his soul. Not the best time for it, really, but a holy man is a holy man through and through. This escalates quickly into an out of the blue insurrection, with all Vlad's followers attempting to burn him alive. Almost as soon as this starts it's over, with Vlad promising his people that they are safe, and that he will stop Mehmet. It's a little fast a push towards that being resolved, it seems all these people are awfully quickly swayed one way or another, but it gets things moving.

Soon enough, the final battle approaches, there is something of a subplot with Mehmet convincing his entire army to wear blindfolds for the entire march so they don't fear Vlad, but it really wasn't relevant in the end. It makes the entire enemy army look ridiculous, as if they're just going to take the blindfolds off as soon as the battle starts, what was the point? These aren't superstitious militia we're dealing with, these are highly trained soldiers of the world's finest army. They aren't going to scare easily.

Vlad takes to the top of his highest tower, wearing his best long black coat, and takes in the size of the approaching army of a hundred thousand. Drawing on his power to command the creatures of the night, Vlad summons a colossal horde of bats to do his bidding. This was probably the most fun scene in the entire film, it's great fun. Commanding his squeaking, flapping army with movements of his hand, he drives the bats into the approaching hordes like a battering ram (Hehe, geddit?) and then, ordering them all up into the sky, bringing them down again to desolate the Turks like the meteor scene in Armageddon. It's awesome, it's like one of the crazier disciplines in Vampire: The Masquerade brought to life. However fundamental physics make it all a little silly when you think about it. These bats he's controlling thunder into the enemy, throwing armoured soldiers into the air like rag dolls. Regardless of how many he's controlling, they are still just tiny bats. In the end, the result of such an assault would feel less like a meteor and more like a million ping pong balls falling on your head.

After the initial bat assault, Vlad takes to the field, and the full battle commences, but his physical prowess is let down by his battle planning, and a unit of Turks gets into the monastery to assault the defenseless people of Transylvania. Vlad's son is taken by the Turkish commander, and his wife is left hanging precariously from the highest tower. With all Vlad's speed, he can't quite get there in time, leading to an excruciatingly melodramatic falling scene, set to music, in slow motion, as she falls to her doom. By the time Vlad's done chatting with her remarkably unharmed but close to death body after that fall, the Turkish army has got away, and the monastery is left in ruins. If all this sounds like a weirdly paced and tumbly assortment of events, it's because it really was. Why did Mehmet himself even need to be there? Why leave only taking one captive? No booty? Did the Turkish soldiers even get to rest? You marched them the whole way here blindfolded and now you're marching them all the way back to Turkey after a battle? You asshole Mehmet!

Vlad does the only thing he can over the body of his beloved wife. He takes her blood, gaining the full power of the Vampire, and condemns himself to the darkness. Returning to walk among the fallen in the monastery, Vlad sees people are shattered and defeated, and his son and heir to the throne of Transylvania taken by the Turks. He knows he must go after them. In a quite great moment, he goes to Grant, who lies dying, and asks “Do you want revenge?”

The eyes of many of the fallen and broken look up to him, realizing what he offers. It is a good scene.

Mehmet's main camp watches as a storm approaches, lightening crashes, and the darkness surges in. The newly changed Grant and Peggy lead a group of vampires down on the Turkish army, slaughtering them wholesale, while Vlad make the final assault on Mehmet. In the silver coated finery of Mehmet's tent, where Vlads son is held captive, the final confrontation takes place.

Of course Mehmet has a silver sword. We've gone the whole movie with no one being able to remotely stand against Vlad in combat, there had to be some threat, but it feels somewhat forced, when we know he can explode into unstoppable bats at will, or just bring the tent down around him. But fight honorably Vlad does, somehow Mehmet seems the superior combatant, knocking Vlad around plenty. The presence of silver is a sort of excuse to this odd encounter, but Vlad wore a silver ring around his neck the whole film and still tore apart armies without trouble. That it would weaken him so much to as to lose most of the battle against an ordinary man didn't make much sense.

Vlad defeats Mehmet, drawing strength from his son, and returns outside to face his new brethren. Peggy suggests killing the boy, their last link to humanity, and Vlad is torn between his new existence and his old. The boy is saved by the inexplicable appearance of our hero monk from the monastery, who arrives to take the boy to safety, while the sun burns down from above and exterminates the vampires. The vampires that are standing around rows and rows of tents that are historically proven to keep out sunlight. That was a head scratcher.

Vlad himself lets out a cry of defiance as the sun comes down on him, and he falls, left in the dust of the destroyed Turkish camp. It would have been a fair ending, with the young son being crowned king of Transylvania, to carry on the peace into the next generation.

But no, we know Dracula can't end here. It must go on.

Dragged from the battlefield by a mysterious follower (He was around earlier, the only one in the whole movie who tries on a Transylvanian accent, we'll call him Dirty Den) who pulls the body of Vlad from the sunlight and into a tent, to force his blood down the throat of the vampire, and return him from the dead. 

Fast forward six hundred odd years. Yes it's one of those endings.

A modern day Vlad walks amongst the streets of a glistening city, when he comes across a woman who looks the spitting image of his lost wife. He introduces himself, sounding just like he did in the 1400's, and she says her name is Mina. Ah, so here we have come around at last to the Dracula we know. They walk off together, the threads of fate seemingly intertwining them again. All the while the elder vampire watches on (God DAMN does Charles Dance look sharp in a suit) 

There are a few mystifying turns about Dracula Untold. The exact mythology behind the 'curse' Vlad is under doesn't really make sense. The elder vampire states he's been trapped in the cave for years, until he found someone to take his place. There seemed to be no reason he couldn't leave whenever he wanted, and Vlad certainly wasn't compelled to take his place when he drank human blood. That didn't make much sense. It seems Vlad never really used his powers as well as he could, and everyone that dies manages to do it dramatically in Vlad's arms. That all said, it does a good job of not slipping into the melodrama you would expect. I could have done without a lot of the scenes involving Vlad and his wife, they just seemed to drag on, but not because she was bad, just because their relationship was very dull compared to the rest of the action.

It's also fun to play spot the Game of Thrones residue amongst the cast, with Paul Kaye and Art Parkinson both playing the exact same character they do in the HBO show (This will go triple if they bring back Tywin Lannister as a vampire in season 5)

As far as historical action/drama supernatural movies go, Dracula Untold is up there with other big, fun, stupid films like Underworld and Pathfinder. They have their place, and there are certainly worse choices for a bit of Dracula entertainment in the month of Halloween. At least you won't have to sit through hearing Keanu Reeve's English accent again.