The Mummy: 10 Monster Films It Must Improve Upon
1. Van Helsing (2004)
When The Mummy Returns made $430 million worldwide, Universal asked director Stephen Sommers to create another franchise based on their classic monster movies – which he’d clearly never seen. Sommers’ Mummy films owe more to Indiana Jones than Boris Karloff (or even Lon Chaney Jr in bandages), but with Van Helsing, he turns the monsters into comic book villains.
Seen briefly early on, Mr Hyde is the same ridiculous Hulk-like character we saw in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, while Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster have become so nonthreatening that they may as well be advertising breakfast cereal. Then there’s Van Helsing himself, who in this version becomes a monster hunter employed by the Vatican. He gets corny one-liners and a ton of gadgets, so Hugh Jackman plays him like a suave secret agent, not a bad idea when he’s acting against Kate Beckinsale’s glorified Bond girl.
Whether they’re a deformed hunchback or a Vatican priest, every character gets the same lame, painfully unfunny dialogue. When a man transforms into a werewolf, someone says, “Why does it smell like wet dog in here?” Someone tells Frankenstein’s monster: “I don’t know if you’ve seen a mirror lately, but you stick out in a crowd.”
The film flopped, too.