I, Frankenstein (PG 13)
"Descend in pain"
Mary Shelly's Frankenstein has been a SciFi zeitgeist from the beginnings of modern media, and her magnum opus is quickly discarded then exploited for a pretentiously slick Action/CGI-laden good vs evil parable from the makers of the Underworld franchise (which are other pretentiously slick Action/CGI-laden good vs evil parables).
What is the story? Typical cookie cutter devils vs angels end-of-humanity story, the twist being instead of angels the good guys are hideous gargoyles, who actually just transform into fashion models in cheap, cheesy Ren Faire costumes.
Frankenstein's monster has had many iterations, from Boris Karloff in clodhoppers to Robert De Niro in furious agony. Most appearances have been hulking wretches with a sympathetic core, misunderstood and menacing. The monster in this update, underplayed by Aaron Eckhardt (Thank You For Smoking), is neither hulking (he's barely taller than most of the actresses) nor a sniveling wretch (he's more of an emo car wreck victim in a hoodie and jeans). While his choices (Batman voice?) and action movie adequacy are certainly up for debate, he is by no means the weakest link here. The entire film is weak links latched to the ghosts of better ideas done better (famous character turned into evil action movie, modern world with a hidden supernatural war, Frankenstein has the name Adam and dresses like a martial arts street skater, oh wait that's I, Frankenstein's one idea and probably it's worst).
If you ever desired to unironically see ol' Vick Frank's Monster in a kung fu training montage, perhaps this is your movie. If you'd rather see writers who create instead of lifting wholesale from the classics with stupid annotations, cinematographers that don't just copy other genre mistakes like Van Helsing, studios that don't rubber stamp dreck after dreck release, then you should stay away from this unanimated corpse of a film. For a movie about a recently dead guy fighting a bedeviled and Bill Nighy (Sean of the Dead) in shoddy prosthetic makeup, there are precious few signs of life and almost zero electricity.
3 Capital Fs out of 10 (BAD)
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