I just got back from watching it, and I say **** those reviews. It's not a horror film, but it hasn't been marketed that way. It could have used perhaps another 10-15 minutes to pad it out, but other than that it really worked for me. Luke Evans, Art Parkinson, and especially Charles Dance were great, Dominic Cooper though, was pretty average as the Sultan Mehmet. The cinematography was great, especially in IMAX. Ramin Djawadi's soundtrack was both demonic and angelic at times, the action was pretty epic, the likes of which you'd see in Lords of Shadows. Basically the movie is 40% Historical Epic and 60% Dark Fantasy, with several elements of the historic war between Vlad Tepes and Mehmet the Conqueror (the infamous forest of impaled Turks is a major moment in the film).
The main problems come about because it's been tied into the Universal Monsters universe, forcing a lot of stuff, added world building, that only vaguely ties into Vlad's story. Yet, at the same time it works well as the "Captain America" of the Universal Monster series, with Charles Dance's character potentially being either the "Nick Fury" or "Thanos" of this new world, depending on how you look at it.
Basically, as a history buff I really appreciated that they went into the whole backstory of Vlad Dracula and his connection with the Ottoman Empire, and his struggle to prevent the Turks from taking his homeland and all of Europe. On that score it worked for me, and as Castlevania: Lords of Shadow fan, I also got a kick out of this for showing Dracula as demonic Demi-God.
It's not a great film, but it's good enough and it's a very unique twist on the classic Dracula mythos. And for what it's worth, it's better than Van Helsing or the latter two Mummy films.
Art Parkinson absolutely killed it in this.
