In the 1930s, Universal Pictures made a bunch of movies starring horror monsters from classic novels. Movies like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy. Universal milked those characters for all they were worth, to the point that they started showing up in weirder and wackier things like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein all the way to Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. Obviously this had diminishing returns. By the 1950s, Universal finally stopped throwing those characters at anything they could (and after Abbot and Costello had “met” pretty much all of them).

Anyway, in the 2010s the Marvel Cinematic Universe was basically printing money so Universal decided it was time to blow the dust off their old horror movie monsters and get in on this “cinematic universe” cash cow. They decided to create their own “Dark Universe” with all the classic Universal monsters. To kick it all off, they created Dracula Untold. And it failed miserably. The lesson they learned from this failure was to go all-in and throw even more money at the problem, hiring big name actors for these roles:

They got Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella for The Mummy, Russel Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, and Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s monster. While Dracula Untold was a standalone movie with plans for future tie-ins (like the first Iron Man movie), The Mummy (2017) was basically an Avengers-level movie that threw in everyone they could. And it failed even harder. So the Dark Univrse was completely abandoned as a cinematic universe and will now only live on as a park at Universal Studios Orlando. What a waste.

But what about Dracula Untold as a movie? Well, it’s fine. It definitely isn’t strong enough to carry an entire cinematic universe, but it isn’t really a bad movie. It just isn’t a Dracula movie. Or a vampire movie, not really.

There’s a quote from the director which says:

Anybody who’s going to the film expecting a horror film, is going to be sorely disappointed. For me, it was telling a story. I was trying to tell a good drama, that has action-adventure elements to it.

So this Dracula movie was never intended to be a horror film. But I think it also fails as a “good drama”.

The movie stars Luke Evans as Vlad the Implaer. We’re told by other characters in the movie that he was a child soldier and was absolutely ruthless and bloodthirsty. But the Vlad played by Luke Evans is neither of those things. He’s a loving and caring husband and father (like, way more than any husband or father in the 1400s ever would’ve been). He never really shows anger or a dark side. Sure, he’s a good fighter, but from the audience’s perspective he’s basically a pacifist.

Anyway, there’s an invading Ottoman army that arrives and Vlad simply wants to protect his lands. He meets a vampire in a cave who says “I’ll give you the powers of a vampire for three days and if you don’t drink any blood in that time, you’ll turn back into a human. But if you drink blood at any point, you’ll remain a vampire forever.” Now, given that this movie is called Dracula Untold and is the first movie in a larger cinematic universe, we all know where this is going. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say he’s going to drink blood at some point. So yeah, he holds off the army for three days but (gasp!) he needs a fourth day to completely wipe them out! Also, he mostly just has the power to control bats; he’s not much of a “vampire” in my opinion. But maybe that goes back to the director’s point about this not being a horror movie.

Overall, I think the backstory in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula does a better job of setting up this character. I think Gary Oldman did a better job of being so passionate in both his hatred and his love that he would renounce God and curse himself to become a vampire. In comparison, Luke Evans’ Vlad is essentially making a deal with the devil and loses. Vlad knew what he was getting himself into (and the consequences for it) and consciously made the decision. I think this is one of those cases where if the movie didn’t have “Dracula” in the title and was just a supernatural action movie set in the 1400s it would’ve been more enjoyable. It was probably my expecations for what a Dracula movie should be that brought it down. So this isn’t so much a bad movie as it is a missed opportunity.

Here’s a trailer. You can watch it right now on Netflix.