I'll make this one pretty quick. Dracula Untold is an origin story to Vlad prior to him becoming a vampire. While it dawns the rating of PG 13 (Boooo...) there's plenty to take home from the film itself.
This movie actually does an okay job of dealing with the mythos of Vlad. By that I mean it doesn't just piss itself and turn into a fanatically stupid film right off the bat. There's a central conflict where Vlad needs the powers of a recently found vampire to save his people.
The great news about all this is that the film spends very little time worrying about the politics of it all and jumps right into the vampire doing cool vampire things and Vlad being pushed into making an unholy contract with him. Yes...there's some sort of back story to how bad ass Vlad was at some point, but essentially he need Vamp powers or else his land is going to get fucked up and he'll lose his son.
Alright. So vampire fight, don't eat people...vampire fight...don't eat people. Vampire fight. You get the point. The gimmick is that if Vlad feeds he'll remain a cursed member of the undead forever and release his master vampire from his cave like prison. Last 3 days without feeding you're back to human. No harm no foul.
Needless to say some shit goes down and it leads to possibly the dumbest final fight in a movie I've seen in a long long time. I was really enjoying what they were doing with this film until the last fight. Spoilers baby! Oh the spoilers!
Vlad fights a man who is using pieces of silver coin and flinging them at Vlad to harm him. You know, vampires hate silver and fuck those coins! He can't take it! It's a span of 10 minutes that I wish I could have back. I won't get it back though. It's okay, its for you love of the reader.
Alright, this film isn't bad for the first two thirds of it. The recycling of vampire fighting is a little dumb, but all in all it's a decent enough walk on the wild side of Vlad. you get a lot of good character interactions and they get right to the point about how bad ass the vampires are.
That last part with the fight and the coins is terrible. This all leads to a final scene where Vlad meets Mina and a Van Helsing kinda fella says some stupid catch phrase "Let the games begin" as he begins walking towards Vlad as he walks away with Mina. This essentially can mean that this series of movies will continue but I would prefer they don't.
Okay, let's be clear on why this movie isn't complete garbage. They took some careful writing and a lot of time to make Vlad's plight very human. In fact, its probably one of the more human takes on the Dracula mythos. No one really asked for the film, but it's kind of an HBO goodie for a bit. If you can get past the political drama and the fight with the sultan its not bad. In fact, honestly, the vampire fighting is pretty cool to start with, but by the third time you're over it.
All in all, you could watch this, its okay to do so while you're working on something maybe, but don't expect this to be a great addition to your friendly fanged collection.
4827 flying bats erupting from a cave out of 82750 pieces of silver that the sultan randomly had around to shoot at Vlad.
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