Dracula Untold (2014)

  This is not going to be the majority opinion, I am sure, but I really liked this movie.  I was that weird girl in elementary school who read every legend and account of Vlad the Impaler.  While I think the movie has some execution (ha!) issues, overall it took a tired old concept and revamped it (I am on a roll!) using what inspired Brom Stoker instead of his work.

Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans) was given as a child to the Ottoman Empire by his father and learned to be a ruthless killing machine, earning the name The Impaler.  He then left the Empire to rule the principality of Transylvania, married the lovely Mirena (Sarah Gadon), and had a son (Art Parkinson).  He is trying to be a good ruler to his people and appease the sultan, Mehmet II (Dominic Cooper), but when the sultan demands 1000 boys for his army and Vlad's son as a royal hostage, he realizes appeasement isn't really in the cards.  Desperate, Vlad turns to the monster in the mountain, a creature supposedly cursed by the devil to drink human blood, and strikes a bargain with him (Charles Dance).  Vlad will have three days of borrowing the vampire's power in order to defeat Mehmet, but if he drinks human blood during that time he will be cursed forever.

There were so many things this movie got right that it almost feels unfair to talk about the stuff they got wrong.  The main issue is that it draws too many comparisons to 300 and that is valid.  A lot of the scenes, including the one where he's climbing the mountain with a red cape billowing, could have been interchangeable.  All of the side characters were total shells -- I don't remember anybody other than his best friend (Diarmaid Murtagh) getting a name -- and they don't matter at all.  They focus so much on how good and self-sacrificing Vlad is, it almost strays into piousness.  The man murders a lot of people, so it strikes kind of a false note.

That being said, there was so much vampire lore here.  They got aversion to sunlight, silver, and holy items, enhanced strength, speed, and senses, the ability to call and transform into animals (specifically, bats), and of course the blood drinking.  The Master Vampire had a lot of similarities to Murnau's Nosferatu, while Evans went the more modern vampire-with-washboard-abs route, and the armor reminded me of Gary Oldman's in Coppola's Dracula.  But not in a "we're totally copying this" way, more of the "hey, we saw that too, wasn't it neat?"  It just felt like the makers had a lot of love for vampires and Stoker's version in particular, especially the way they tied up the ending.  It is open-ended but didn't feel like the obligatory push for a sequel.  Instead, it set up the cyclical nature of the story and left the rest to the audience.

I was not expecting a love letter to a horror icon.  I was expecting a popcorn flick with a decent cast.  I was pleasantly surprised and I think you will be, too, if you give it a chance.