I, Frankenstein

Whenever I watch these awards shows and they have the presenters come out, the host or PA announcer always mentions their upcoming projects as they walk up to the podium. And every now and then you hear cool things like” Here’s Keanu Reeves in the upcoming Matrix” but for the most part you hear “And here’s Kevin Hart who will be starring in the upcoming Black Hammer Detective : Who Dey Who Dey Who Let’s Ride” or “Here is Aaron Eckhart of I, Frankenstein”. I always wonder what their peers are thinking when they hear these things. Are they happy for the simple fact that their friends are still collecting checks or are they secretly giggling inside? It’s like the year Eddie Murphy was up for best supporting actor in Dreamgirls and they announced “Here’s Eddie Murphy star of the just released Norbit!”. You know Leo Dicaprio was somewhere shaking his head as his supermodel girlfriend was informing him that it was his turn to go in champagne pong. Yes, that exists; I just saw a pic of Daft Punk doing it!

Anyway, I went into I, Frankenstein with the lowest of expectations when I saw that Rotten Tomatoes gave it a rating of 4% . With that awful rating and a late January release, there was no way I was paying the 3D price for it and I felt the need to rope a buddy of mine into this experience with me. They start the movie off by giving you a 50 second recap of what the book was about and how Frankenstein’s monster came into being. Coincidentally that was about a third of the time it took me to read the Cliff notes version of the very same book, so needless to say, the screenwriter and I had about the same level of insight as to what that story was really about.

I literally almost walked out of the theater when the Gargoyles flew in to save Frankenstein’s monster (Eckhart) and gave the lamest version of “it’s alive, it’s alive” ever! Looking back however, that scene was actually quite money! The Gargoyles in this movie act as God’s earthly protectors of the human race from Satan’s demons, and apparently he has a demon prince named Naberius who is played by the underrated Bill Nighy. I say he’s underrated because Nighy is not picky about what he’s in and whether the movie is crap or not, he always steps up his game and brings unquestionable awesomeness to the set. But Naberius is on a mission to find and capture Adam (the name given to Eckhart by the head Gargoyle) with the hopes that he can learn the method Frankenstein used to create him. He has designs on creating an evil army to take over the world.

Adam has always been a loner and has a hard time accepting who he is because of what he is. So he has a lot of hate in his heart and basically wants to beat up everything that’s in his path. This all changes when he discovers that Frankenstein logged a journal of his work and that somehow this journal lands in the hands of a beautiful scientist that happens to be working for Naberius.

As you can see, the plot isn’t completely ridiculous but they did miss out on the opportunity for some pretty cool jokes. For instance, when Naberius goes up to his lab, the elevator stops on the 5^th floor; um clearly he should’ve gotten off on floor 666. And throughout the entire movie, they called their creation of man the reanimation process, a process in which they took dead bodies and tried to bring their soulless shells back to life. There was a scene where the doctor and Eckhart were alone in his apartment (not sure how he was able to afford one) and there was clearly an opportunity for her to ask “So…when you were brought to life, was uh, everything reanimated?” And that’s when you cue Soul to Soul’s Back to Life, Back to Reality! while he takes her and proves that he's all man! 

Ok that’s enough, but with the exception of a missed opps, this movie was unbelievably entertaining. Outside of how lame the makeup looked for the demons at times, there were quite a few fight scenes that were pretty cool and some decent cgi that accompanied them. Adam’s weapons of choice led to a pseudo gun kata fighting style which was pretty fresh and the score playing in the background made him seem cooler than he actually was as he stalked up and down the dark streets of this modern day city.

Is this movie poetry? No, but if you want mindless entertainment that will make you openly cheer at times, I suggest that you pop in. I can’t believe critics gave the worst comedy I’ve seen in years in Anchorman a rating of 89% and this got a 4. I rate this movie as FRESH! 

Oh and for those who dont know what gun kata is, check out the movie Equilibrium.