Cast:
Kristanna Loken (Rayne), Michael Madsen (Vladimir), Ben Kingsley (Kagan), Michelle Rodriguez (Katarin), Matthew Davis (Sebastian), Will Sanderson (Domastir), Geraldine Chaplin (Fortune Teller), Udo Kier (Regal Monk), Meat Loaf (Leonid), Michael Paré (Iancu), and Billy Zane (Elrich) Directed by Uwe Boll (#1765 - In the Name of the King, #1924 - Alone in the Dark, #2144 - House of the Dead)
Review:
I forgot that Boll wanted to be a filmmaker because he saw Mutiny on the Bounty as a kid...the Marlon Brando version. This was the third film in what you might as well call the Boll Gaming Cycle that came in the wake of House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark (2005). The movie is based on the action-adventure game series of the same name, which began in 2002 involving various locations being visited by a member of the "brimstone Society" to deal with supernatural creatures and Nazis. An "unrated" director's cut came out on DVD, incidentally, which apparently came out with a copy of BloodRayne 2 on it (incidentally, the series has had just one game released since the film came out). The next video game movie Boll did for theaters was In the Name of the King (2007). You might recognize that the screenplay was written by Guinevere Turner, who apparently delivered a first draft a few weeks late that Boll went right in to pick and choose what to use immediately (which was apparently 20%) for the actors to apparently take a crack at it. While the movie was a financial failure, Boll would direct two sequels for the direct-to-video market: BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007) and BloodRayne: The Third Reich (2011), in which only Michael Paré appears in each film of the "trilogy".
It probably goes without saying that Boll has not managed to achieve anything in the manner of effective entertainment even when having a video game right there for adaptation. In the aim of blood, dirt, and sex, the success rate is about on the same level as an apple becoming a tomato (one interview had him stating it would possibly be two hours but it ended up being 95 minutes long). It certainly never seems sexy even with its attempts at doing so with leather outfits and I kid you not, hiring actual prostitutes to be in a scene (as one does when filming in Europe). The thing about Boll is that he seems to direct things as if it was a blunt instrument to plow through regardless of who is cast or the scenario. He has a lead actress in Loken that might as well be playing T-X from Terminator 3 all over again. He has a movie where one actor called it an "abomination" that still would say yes to being in another Boll movie. The best parts in the whole movie is either Meat Loaf lounging around with prostitutes or the bits and pieces where Madsen seems interested enough to actually make effort (probably the result of liquid courage, but I can think of worse ways to get through a film). It probably is most amusing to see Zane in the film when you have the whole context: Zane liked being with such a "decisive" director even in a small role and he apparently gave Boll the idea to use Romar Entertainment (which Zane was involved with) as a way to handle distribution of the film to a target of 2,000 theaters...only 950 theaters ended up getting the film on opening day and Boll later sued Zane (incidentally, Zane co-starred alongside Loken in Boll's Darfur film, released in 2009). Christian Slater might not be a particularly great actor, but at least him being in the aforementioned Dark film seemed to make sense. But Kingsley? An Academy Award-winning actor wanting to play a vampire deciding to join here? I suppose it must be a British tradition in the Michael Caine sense, but even Caine was better at this, because Kingsley barely delivers actual substance to what is meant to be a villainous role. One sees more effort in the makeup job than from Kingsley, who can't even play to the cheap seats for something funny. The movie is listless and barely seems competent to actually approach what you might call filmmaking. It just feels like a movie patched together, where even a sequence of someone trying to dodge traps (and water, because ooooh, water) has little weight to actually level attention to. The sex scene might actually inspire confusion over how it is staged more than anything, and yet somehow this is a movie that is more tolerable than Bolero (1984), even with all of the godforsaken wigs. As a whole, this is merely just a boring bad flick, not even measuring up to the lesser vampire movies you've probably seen before. It isn't completely incompetent as with some of Boll's previous line of work because it just is blah B-movie stuff that really should not have tried to be anything more. It is dull and goofy in ways that would probably be amusing with a couple of beers for the turkey night, I suppose.
Overall, I give it 2 out of 10 stars.
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