I, Frankenstein
Rated: M
1 out of 5
Now showing
IN THE opening scenes of I, Frankenstein, Dr Frankenstein pushes the body of his living creation, bound in rags and chains, into a river in the hopes it will die, only to find that the ‘monster’ can’t be killed.
But unlike the unfortunate creature, director and screenwriter Stuart Beattie’s film is dead in the water.
The film is based on a graphic novel series, and it has a heavy gothic, vampish feel in the settings and costumes which I suspect are a faithful rendition, but unfortunately come off second rate.
I, Frankenstein opens in the late 18th century, where Victor Frankenstein has already stitched, revived and tried to drown his creation, later called Adam, which is played by Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight, Thank You For Smoking).
Steaming through these scenes, we learn that Adam, a dead ringer for Alice Cooper, but perfectly chiselled beneath all the hair and eyeliner, has superhuman strength and can’t be killed.
Combine that with the sudden emergence of some dodgy-looking demons (possibly the same make-up crew from Charmed or Star Trek in the 1980s) who are at war with gargoyles, aka guardians of the human race, and suddenly the Frankenstein plot has a supernatural back-story.
The demons, under the rule of a demon prince (played for some reason by Bill Nighy), want to capture Adam, along with Dr Frankstein’s diary account of how he brought him to life, to raise an army of demonic dead.
Fast forward 200 years and Adam is still roaming the earth, albeit with shorter hair and some pretty fashionable clothes, and has taken to hunting down demons.
The film is based on a graphic novel series, and it has a heavy gothic, vampish feel in the settings and costumes which I suspect are a faithful rendition, but unfortunately come off second rate.
The script is dull, the acting wooden and at times incredibly amateur, and the characters have no chemistry with each other.
The existence of Adam’s soul, which should have been the backbone of the film, is weakly touched upon, and because Beattie hasn’t been successful in getting us to emotionally invest in any of the characters we don’t particularly care about their fate.
Eckhart tries to anchor the film and Nighy gives a decent performance, but the modern Prometheus angle promised here is never properly explored and all the philosophical nuances of Shelley’s Frankenstein are completely lost.
