He missed.
The movie is a fantasy/horror/romance. It fails at all three. Let me go into why!
The fantasy aspect had him doing some of the typical Dracula things and had these odd little gargoyle minions around the castle. No explanation. Little gargoyles.
The horror aspect was him being a vampire. Big whoop. Like we didn't know that. They tried to give it angst by him turning from God because he begged the priest to make sure his wife didn't die, she did, and he said he wouldn't turn back to God until he found her again. M'kay.
That sets up the romance where he's searching through time to find her again. Um. OK. He figures out that random wandering isn't going to do it so he invents a perfume that makes him irresistible and we get a montage of him visiting various courtly locations over the ages and being fawned over by women. There's choreographed dancing too.
They set this one in France so all the standard characters are slightly off. That shouldn't be a surprise. There's the unnamed priest vampire hunter (Van Helsing) who is called in when a female vampire is captured and they don't know what to do with her.
John Harkness is there to do legal things for Dracula and, surprise surprise, his Mina is the woman Dracula is seeking. So now we get to go to Paris where everyone speaks with an English accent.
Dracula charms her and brings up things she should remember, and she does. She really is his wife returned to him and she's all for it. He takes her back to his castle, everyone gets upset about this, and the local army gets called in to get her back. The unnamed priest kills Dracula. Harkness sees Mina was really into Dracula and walks off. The unnamed priest wanders off. Bald kids with loincloths all leave the castle looking stunned so they're probably the gargoyles transformed back from the kids we didn't know they were.
See how it fails on all these things?
There's some serious plagiarism concerns about this movie and I guess that's not the first time the director has been called out on that. It does draw a lot from previous movies to the point where it seems like he was picking and choosing stuff he liked and dropped it into this one.
I will say it wasn't a movie on my list to see and it really was bad enough that people were laughing when it was probably supposed to be shocking or pretentious. We both burst out laughing when it was over. The end credit started with the movie being really named "Dracula - A Love Story".
I'm not against people trying to reinterpret the Dracula stuff. I'm not. The framework has been used because it works and adding another viewpoint isn't going to go wrong, until it does. Could this have worked? I'm iffy on that one, given the whole premise of him actually finding his wife again. That's the core of the problem I have. The idea of soulmates was pushed hard from the beginning.
His general had to quite literally pull him away (and out of) his wife to go fight the battle outside the castle. That was icky. He kept trying to go back to her while they put his armor on him. Not exactly the making of a great battle leader. For whatever reason his wife dressed up all pretty and rode away from the castle. I don't think a reason was ever given since the place wasn't in danger of being overrun and honestly who wears a tall crown and velvet cape when escaping on horseback? Obviously she's killed in the attempt, when she could have been safe in the castle. So really she killed herself with her stupidity. But I digress.
The actors seemed to try. They did. What they had to work with was imperfect. The sets were lovely. The costumes, for the most part, were lovely. The script itself was not.
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