Located in: Opinions
Posted on: January 26th, 2014 No Comments

“I, Frankenstein” collapses under tonal failures, lack of self-awareness


,

Yikes.

Serious treatments of Frankenstein’s monster have always faltered on the big screen for one reason or another, with examples ranging from the misguided (Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) to the abominable (Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing). Regardless of whether or not “I, Frankenstein” qualifies as serious, writer-director Stuart Beattie’s adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name at least appeared to offer a new, albeit ludicrous, take on Mary Shelley’s gothic horror classic.

Posing as a direct sequel to Shelley’s book, the story picks up with the monster (Aaron Eckhart) deciding to give his creator, the eponymous Victor Frankenstein, a proper burial (“It’s more than he deserved,” grumbles Eckhart—a lot of grumbling from him here) when he is inexplicably ambushed by demons. While he manages to dispatch a few by himself, gargoyles eventually rescue him. Recognizing something special about the monster, the gargoyle queen names him Adam and tells him of a perpetually ongoing war between heaven and hell unbeknownst to humanity, etc. Fast-forward to present day, and Adam is ready to take it to the demon leader Prince Naberius (Bill Nighy), one exploding demon at a time.

The film’s generic good versus evil setup ensures that none of the specifics it belabors us with really matter. Serving solely to get us from one incoherent set piece to the next, the plot oafishly sidesteps itself and its characters at every turn—two different instances show Adam confronted with troubling revelations about his existence only to react accordingly by jumping through the nearest window.

The action scenes aren’t half-bad when we can actually see what’s going on (a memorable one pits Adam against one of Naberius’ lieutenants in the basement of a collapsed building), but the large-scale, CGI-heavy skirmishes depicting multitudes of demons bursting into flames are so uninspired that they could very well have been generated by an iTunes visualizer.

For a movie that nearly achieves Zen in terms of its jazz-handed indifference, “I, Frankenstein”’s biggest problem is that it has no sense of irony. It operates on a tonal level that is dead serious when it should be deadpan—and sometimes that works, but not here. Watching an otherwise decent actor like Eckhart delivering a line like, “Descend in pain, demon!” should at least be stupid fun.

In “I, Frankenstein,” it’s not even entertaining.

amaenche@mavs.coloradomesa.edu

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

New User? Click here to register