Chain Dog Michael J. Bassett essentially managed to make for $45 million what Steven Sommers shot for 160 lemons, namely Van Helsing. Without the glamorous cast and romantic gloss of adventure, drowning in the dirt and gloom of all the confrontation of forces of the universe, and clearly demonstrating the choice of “either death or slavery” in the entourage of the Middle Ages. But now a hero appears, gradually becoming on the path of the holy blade after a dark past and many sins, for which the Devil has long been waiting for him.
The classic story of saving an innocent soul in the name of redemption is spiced up with a superfluous set of visual design scenes in which artists famously display budget surpluses, creating either Del Torovsk freaks in mirrors, or the Tolkien demon-golem, and playing with tension against all logic. And in fact, cinema turns into an art of visual skill, where even dirt and gloom take on beautiful and elegant forms, the frame is verified by the censorship accuracy of the lack of genre and the demonstrative excesses without accents. Here, without regret, the eyes are burned, children are slaughtered and the settlements are killed, but only occasionally can one see the blood gushing and the severed head bouncing off. The whole sea of violence is veiled in seconds, and a set of boo-effects turns the heroic story into a medieval horror film, from which the hall shudders, and especially impressionable ones squeal fear.
Probably, this was the purpose of the film - to make a dark and cruel movie that plays its budget due to the scenery, panoramas and quite good special effects. Basset clearly tries to show how Van Helsing would have been if it had been shot not by Sommers, but by Guillermo Del Toro, immersing the world in fabulous gloom, filling the atmosphere with tension and a host of mystical monsters, and mercilessly playing on the nerves of the viewer from stage to stage. However, the credits barely begin, and it seems that they did not shoot a separate movie, but directly the prequel to the same “Van Helsing”, a kind of formation of a man in a hat on the path of combating evil spirits, leaving the way to continue the story, but completely completing the plot part of a separate episode.
In the name of justice and redemption, the merciless hero-savior does good by bloodshed and the salvation of innocent souls, as much as is possible in an era of merciless cruelty and the time of the kingdom of shadows. The chain dog gets his way time and time again, following the heels of his abusers, like a detective looking for evidence and looking for a killer. But the whole intrigue of exposing evil comes down to almost the obvious, flashbacks of the past are informative as much as they leave room for further sequels and immersions in memories and nightmares, only rare tenacious episodes, able to present important moments of the past.
And the problem of the film will be reduced to a banal repetition of “Return of the Jedi”, while the scenery is struggling to change the cosmic landscapes to a mystical version of the 1600s, inciting more and more creatures to the poor savior of the people, at least somehow somehow somehow playing out the final intrigues, revealing cards battered from old age. And if Del Torowsky's "Hellboy" is at least funny and humorous, then Bassett's "Solomon Kane" is just a one-time strong parody of all similar films, but in the modern era of the heyday of resorting to fantasy, antiquity and the Middle Ages in cinema, when the magic of "Harry Potter" becomes gloomy every time, "300 Spartans" fight to death even without the possibility of defeating the enemy, and the upcoming "Battle of the Titans" simply has to become an incredibly spectacular brutal cinematic scene, even more beautifully fits in the cinema, with a more powerful definition of the film, "with such a magnomine, it is more beautiful and a magnomine." Therefore, this film will definitely find its viewer, even if commercial success turns out to be extremely doubtful.
7 out of 10
Original