Dracula Review: Dead And Not Loving It

There are three major influences on just about every modern film version of Dracula. First, of course, Bram Stoker’s seminal epistolary nightmare. Second is the 1927 stage production and subsequent film starring Bela Lugosi, which introduced the idea of the vampire as charismatic sex symbol. However, no less influential is the 1974 movie, crafted by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis and starring Jack Palance as the count, for it was Curtis that introduced the idea of Dracula being haunted and damned by his lost love.

The most famous film to be “inspired,” shall we say, by Curtis was Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and now Luc Besson (Léon, The Fifth Element) does a grave rubbing of that Oscar-nominated favorite. His Count is Caleb Landry Jones, who worked with Besson in oddball crime character study DogMan and inspired this new-ish take on the story of an Eastern European vampire who heads West in search of blood and power. This time he only makes it as far as Paris, but the story remains the same, as he fixates on Mina (Zoë Bleu), the bride of bedeviled English lawyer Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid), who Dracula is convinced is the reincarnation of his own long-dead wife, Elizabeta.

There is some genuine cinematic ingenuity here, like a medieval minefield using bear traps under snowdrifts. Similarly, Besson’s script also makes some interesting tweaks to the standard mythology – for some slightly unfathomable reason, this count is not Vlad the Impaler but Vlad II, voivod of Wallachia and the first of his line to be dubbed Dracul, or dragon. More importantly, it does what no version of Dracula has ever really done before: explore what Vlad has been up to for the last 400 years. But beyond that one sequence, if you’ve seen Coppola’s visually stunning if slightly nonsensical adaptation, then really you’ve seen this film but better. 

What really diminishes Besson’s Dracula is the uneven tone that he creates, one which often turns to seemingly inadvertent comedy. Replacing the Van Helsing character with Christoph Waltz as a chirpy vampire-hunting priest makes for surprising laughs, and it’s hard to say whether that’s what Besson intended or it’s simply a misfire. When Dracula’s CG gargoyle guardians start pulling off pro-wrestling moves, it will induce chortles.

The real tragedy is not in poor Vlad hunting across oceans of time for the reincarnation of Elizabeta, but that Jones is so much better than the material. Even under layers of latex and confined within a derivative script, he seems to be the only cast member to find a real purpose for the funny parts. Vlad’s immortality has become a cruel cosmic joke, and Jones plots out how the centuries have degraded and debased him. He’s neither as simply cruel as Max Schreck‘s Nosferatu, nor as misguidedly romantic as either Jack Palance or Gary Oldman. Instead, his is a surprisingly nuanced incarnation of the bloodsucking beast torn between domineering perversity and tragic love. After all, he’s quite a catch if you overlook the mass murder.

Sadly, there’s little nuance in any other element of Besson’s hyperbolic and derivative version of Coppola’s version, even to the point of some very questionable accents. Beyond Jones and Waltz (who sadly only share the screen for a couple of minutes), no character is memorable as anything other than a pale imitation of the 1992 cast. Call it what it is: Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a copy of a copy.

This article appears in February 6 • 2026.