Oh man this sucks big time. Words struggle to express how
bad this movie is. If you’ve seen the crappy trailer, which promises an
‘Underworld-esque’ action/horror flick, then you may think you know what to
expect. You may even think it looks alright, in a trashy way. You are wrong.
This is a horrible, boring movie devoid of anything of value. It’s not fun,
it’s not exciting, it’s not clever – it’s a dull, aggravating waste of time
that will annoy you. I, Frankenstein is I, Excrement.
Every now and then a movie will come along that’s
just pure garbage, It’ll look alright in a schlocky nonsense way, as a sort of
shitty-but-fun-time that will fill up a lazy afternoon (something like Pompeii
3D), but once you watch it you find that it’s a painful, boring slog. You check
your watch constantly waiting for it to finish, you stop caring about what
happens and start thinking about whether its too late to leave the cinema and
get your money back. All you’re left with are regrets. This is not ‘so-bad-its-good’,
this is not ‘crappy pizza fodder’. This is pure dreck, this is frustrating
boredom. This is I, Frankenstein.
The film centres on Adam, Frankenstein’s monster. The
opening dialogue explains that after his ‘birth’ he ran off aimlessly into the world,
getting caught up in a really lame war between Gargoyles (slightly angelic
protectors of the people, who dress in Roman styled garb when they aren’t
transforming into ugly CGI statue monsters) and Demons (basically Buffy
rejects, with silly face make-up). The demons want him for their own nefarious
purpose, while the gargoyles sort of want his help in culling the demonic
horde, while also planning to eventually take him out. Two hundred years pass
and a big corporation run by Bill Nighy’s king demon is trying to make an army
of undead to take over the world. They need Adam to understand how reanimation
works, or maybe they just need Frankenstein’s journal, or the love
interest/scientist that keeps showing up. It’s all very unclear.
A whole lot of nothing happens. The movie is ninety minutes
long, but nothing really occurs. Adam spends a lot of time wandering the
streets, the gargoyles stand around talking about whether they should kill him
(there’s seriously about five scenes of the gargoyles discussing this), while
Bill Nighy and his demon horde stand around an office building in suits.
One big thing is that Adam is an overwhelmingly unlikeable
protagonist. He has no redeeming features, no character arc, he’s just an ugly,
brooding asshole. When we’re introduced to him in his opening narration, he
reveals that after being ‘born’, he got angry at Dr Frankenstein and murdered
his wife because he wanted Frankenstein to suffer. This is our hero, a
mean-spirited, petty asshole. So when he has to fight to save the world you
won’t really give a shit whether he succeeds or not.
The movie has tried to ape the styling of the Underworld
franchise (particularly that first film) with its gothic city imagery,
perpetual night and two rival clans of unhumans duking it out, but it fails to
do so in any meaningful way. It lacks any confidence or originality, instead
just copying from a more successful franchise it wishes it was. All the attempts to be like the aforementioned vampire/lycan movies come across as laughable. There are several scenes of Adam standing on rooftops looking over a city that is perpetually night, brooding like a teenager who just discovered goth culture. There are silly scenes of him standing around waving sticks in ‘training’ which looks like they handed him the props with no proper instructions so he started waving the around like batons in a school parade.
The acting is god awful, to a painful degree. Every time
somebody opens their mouth they’re about to say something stupid in a boring, serious
way. Horrible Aussie actor Jai Courtney continues his losing streak as a tool
whose every line is ‘Let’s kill Adam’. Bill Nighy gives his most sullen and
boring performance ever, and then in the finale does a weak riff on his ‘evil
dude who pronounces the ends of words weird’ thing he did in Underworld and the
Pirates of the Caribbean films. The worst is, easily, Aaron Eckhart as the
brooding and boring Adam, growling his lines and lacking any presence or
charisma. The man is overwhelmingly unsuited to this sort of role. He works
better as a corporate type character (he was great in ‘Thankyou for Smoking’).
Here he’s entirely out of his element. The rest aren’t any better.
There are a lot of action sequences, but they’re all so
immensely boring, both visually and choreography-wise. Most battles are big,
ugly CGI-fests where gargoyles and demons run into each other, with the former
exploding into white light and the latter burning out in big fireballs. It’s
like a really lame fireworks display. Aaron Eckhart proves himself a weak
action hero, with his stick-waving Adam heading several boring fight scenes
where the choreography feels like an episode of Power Rangers.
I, Frankenstein, like its central figure, is an ugly
mishmash mess of rotting pieces that come together into a hideous, malformed
whole that nobody should have to witness.
No comments:
Post a Comment