Dracula Untold tells the story of Count Dracula that never needed to be told, presenting him as a protagonist who sacrifices his life to save his people. Too serious and gloomy for its own good, Dracula Untold isn’t as bad as it could have been but not nearly as good as it needed to be.

Luke Evans continues to find work while just barely avoiding quality, cursed to obscurity like Dracula is to darkness. And Dracula Untold, despite its generic script and mundane direction, is not that far from being decent… The movie looks slick enough and the action isn’t terrible, though hardly noteworthy.

The movie has two main problems:

1. The premise simply doesn’t work. People, and by “people” I mean me, prefer Dracula to be the bad guy, not the good guy. Evans’ version of Vlad, as he is referred to in the credits, bears no resemblance to any version of the character we’ve seen before; sadly, that isn’t a good thing. No one wants to see Vlad as a generic, Middle Ages-era warrior who just tried to do what’s right.
2. It’s way too serious and way too generic. Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula was dark and eerie, but it had a unique flair and a memorable look. Dracula Untold, directed by first timer Gary Shore, looks like a thousand other forgettable fantasy action-dramas that have been released in the last decade, and combined with its humorless, static screenplay, there just isn’t here to bite your teeth into.

Dracula Untold isn’t the disaster I expected it to be, but it fails to establish why this movie needed to exist in the first place. Better leave this one out in the sun.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.