Where, Oh Where, Do I Begin...

...to describe the truly magnificent silliness that is Van Helsing.

Warning! Spoilers! It may even spoil you wanting to see this movie!

Now, I admit, I didn't go into this movie expecting a whole hell of a lot from it. But in this case I'm ever so glad we saw it at a discount theater.
First off, Van Helsing requires that you not only buy the vampires, werewolves, and the Frankenstein's Monster, but it also requires you to restrain any basic understanding you might have of physics, too.

Here's an example. They're being chased by flying vampires, as they flee in a horse-drawn carriage. At no point does the movie give any reason why a major, frequently traveled bridge over a vast abyss might be out; but it is, leaving a gap longer than a carriage drawn by a team of 6 horses. Now, I've seen a steeplechase; horses have trouble jumping a couple of FEET; not to suggest the existence of super-horses, but they were able to clear the 50-foot+ gap in the bridge, easily. The carriage falls, though - no problem, as it turns out to have been intentional. However, I'm seriously wondering if Stephen Sommers understood when he was writing this movie that the reason cars in Hollywood movies explode when they roll over / fall off something / get bumped in a parking lot is that they have huge tanks of volatile material attached to them. Horse-drawn carriages, as a rule, don't have gas tanks; yet on several occasions in this movie you'll see one roll over or fall off something and burst into flames. (Yet, oddly enough, Frankenstein's mostly-wooden laboratory fails to burst into flames despite near-constant downpours of sparks from the mysterious machinery above.) After the vampires figure out that this carriage was a decoy, they go to seek the other one, which got across the chasm on, I suppose, the other, completely different, and UNDAMAGED bridge.

The plot of this movie sounds like something from The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Dracula, who can only be killed by a werewolf, is trying to capture Frankenstein's Monster, so that he and Igor can use the Monster to bring Dracula's undead offspring (thousands upon thousands of blood-drinking gargoyles) to life. Using anyone other than Frankenstein's Monster is a no-go, as it results in a shelf life of only a few minutes for the offspring before they simply explode into green slime. Van Helsing is a slayer of all sorts of supernatural monstrosities for the Church, as represented by a secret society so secret it only appears in the film for 2 minutes or so, as kind of a nod at Van Helsing having a past.

There's great attention to detail here, too: in one scene a computer-generated werewolf jumps through a glass window. We're not supposed to notice, I guess, that the glass breaks INWARD, even though the werewolf is jumping outward. Nice squib work, guys. Who knows, maybe no-one else noticed. They were too busy oogling Kate Beckinsale, which was no doubt the whole idea.

Numerous times in this movie you'll get to see one or another of the heroes fall off something hundreds of feet high and not only live but remain marvelously uninjured; at one point KB and HJ use a wire at least a kilometer long to swing down from the top of a castle. The wire gets cut, and they swing down to a perfectly safe landing, despite the fact that with the pendulum effect, their landing force would be on the order of a 100-mph car accident. And KB, who falls hundreds of feet in perfect safety at least 3 times in the movie, is mysteriously killed instantly by having a werewolf tackle her from 15 feet away, to land on a SOFA. Mmmmmhmmmmmm.

Both Kate Beckinsale and Hugh Jackman deserve better than this, and they (at best) looked embarrassed to be involved in it, although I suppose I can understand why they were; if your movie career is as limited as theirs have been so far, the prospect of a multi-million dollar paycheck can assuage even the most offended sense of "how-the-hell-did-I-get-into-this-again?"

If you just HAVE to see something with vampires and werewolves, rent Underworld instead; granted, it's cheesy, but still enjoyable. This, like The Core, was only "enjoyable" in terms of "Oh, my God, who came UP with this bullsh**?"

The worst part of this movie, the absolute worst, is the dedication at the end. After sitting through an hour and a half of bad dialogue, computer-generated creatures, and unbelievably poor writing, you are treated to a screen saying "Written and Directed by Stephen Sommers. In Memory of My Dad." If I were his father, I would return from the beyond to pimp-slap him, in public.