I used to be such a big fan of this living legend of a director, from Léon: The Professional (1994) to The Fifth Element (1997) to La Femme Nikita (1990) to even, believe it or not, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). But something seems to have seriously gone wrong with him.

By Emad Aysha
He penned the deeply racist Taken series and From Paris with Love (2010), and to cap it all off, he directed Dracula: A Love Tale (2025). The story is a cheap imitation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), which broke new ground in making you sympathise with the villain. But that’s old hat now.

This movie starts nicely, with the very human Count and his wife enjoying themselves as the Turks invade. The young Count is forced into battle by his men, literally torn from his love’s embrace, and also by the machinations of the church.

UNSUBTLE MOMENTS: A screenshot with the (obviously) firey Matilda De Angelis, (boringly) conservative Zoë Bleu, and (depressingly) brooding Caleb Landry Jones.

For some reason, the bishop speaks Latin in what I presume is an Orthodox Christian setting. Then the Count makes a stupid request, to get God to save his wife, and then he makes an even stupider decision to send her to another near impregnable castle.

The Turks catch up with her, and the Count just gets there in the nick of time, only to kill his wife by accident while throwing a sword at her captor. Did he not know that a sword is longer than a knife, and would impale both of them? And that’s when he turns on the church, even though he’s to blame several times over.

He kills the bishop and renounces God, but for some reason, his devout captains stay with him, to the point of giving his wife a good Christian burial. Eh? Then we skip to the present-day world, where a woman vampire is in custody in Paris, and the buffoon fiancé of Mina, who is now in Romania, is doing a real estate deal for the said Count.

Again, all trodden ground, but done in a lacklustre and haphazard way here. Coincidences reign supreme; there’s no master plan on the part of the good Count. And then, to add insult to injury, the Count (and his ridiculous hairstyle) proceeds to bore us to death with details of his ‘failed’ schemas over a measly 400 years.

He explains how he travelled East to learn perfume-making, then returned West to Venice to finally obtain the perfume he needed to rediscover his reincarnated wife and her pure soul. Not only is this a rip-off of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), it’s a giant waste of time.

The ploy doesn’t flesh out his sweetheart, and he resorts instead to running attractive and decadent aristocratic women into vampires to seek out his long-lost love. He doesn’t use the perfume when he finally confronts her in Paris either. So what was the point of all that senseless messaging?

The movie is a little over two hours long and seems to enjoy wasting our time. The only important action sequence happens way at the end and feels rushed. And the Count also bores us to death with tales of how he tried to kill himself, jumping from a tower over and over again.

Why doesn’t he tell us, instead, what we really want to know? How did he become a vampire? We’re also introduced to his army of little gargoyles, but we never find out how they came to serve him.

At the end, it turns out they’re innocent children possessed by him, but it seems hollow. They’re also not that effective, since we’re also introduced to an elongated sequence where the fiancé escapes and they fail repeatedly to stop him.

I never thought I’d miss Keanu Reeves from the Coppola movie, as the same character, but I do!

SUBSTITUTION EFFECT: Winona Ryder and Gary Oldman, the tragi-romantic couple from Francis Ford Coppola's still superior 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992).

The visuals in Besson’s movie are impressive, along with the set and costume designs, but it still feels askew. The paint is too loud, giving everything a cartoonish character, while the movie design and costumes don’t fully succeed in resurrecting the past.

The music is boring and generic. Only the central actor's sympathy, Caleb Landry Jones, makes the movie half palatable. He gives a deep and sometimes surprising performance, but he’s no Gary Oldman.

The same for the girl of his dreams, played by Zoë Bleu and Christoph Waltz’s character, who is a discount Van Helsing. They’re good but not good enough. Everybody else is a mummy or a caricature.

To his credit, Besson does sneak in some criticisms of the war on terror, bemoaning aristocrats and clergymen for sowing hatred between peoples of different faiths, languages and colours. (Make love, not war).

Mina, moreover, has Andalusian blood, and the Count has a music box that predates the supposed Swiss invention. The Ottoman Sultan is portrayed in cartoonish fashion again, but his soldiers are brave and competent. But everything else is a mess.

What the hell happened? It seems to be the fate of the really great moviemakers to either relive past glories by imitating themselves or recycling other people’s past glories.

Just look at James Cameron. Even Bertolucci fell afoul of this in The Dreamers (2003) and The Sheltering Sky (1990), telling us too much about himself and his past works. The reference to Italian women being given the vote and to movie directors protesting the Indochina War was actually made by those directors.

Those were good movies mind you, with serious acting and great cinematography. But they still go nowhere in the end with a very rushed feel, as if the director is bored with himself or lost his nerve.

BEATING THE ODDS: The dearly departed Leslie Nielsen (1926-2010) in Mel Brooks's 'Dracula: Dead and Loving It' (1995). Lampooning the genre without insulting it!

The same here, with a very speeded-up feeling combined with lousy pacing. The Paris episode takes place during a celebration of the French revolution which the English queen is planning to attend.

Besson also seems to enjoy himself too much with female fantasies when it comes to the overly dressed Mina and the Italian redhead vampiress.

The penultimate sins of self-indulgence, and self-referentiality!!