Stephen Sommers | Through the Shattered Lens

I hated Grind so much that I decided to watch another movie to get it out of my head. I’m glad I did because, for my second movie, I picked a good one.

Catch Me If You Can takes place in Minnesota. The school board is planning on closing down Cathedral High School unless the school can raise $200,000. Class president Melissa (Loryn Locklin) takes charge of the fundraising drive but, even though she pours her heart into all of the car washes and bake sales, she’s only been able to raise $19,000. Dylan Malone (Matt Lattanzi, who was married to Olivia Newton-John) is the school bad boy, who is always late to class because he’s busy racing other cars on the country roads near the school. The principal (Geoffrey Lewis) gives Dylan an option. He can either help Melissa or he can go to detention. Dylan’s idea of helping is to take the money that Melissa has raised and bet on the illegal races that he’s entering. At first, it works. But when the Fat Man (M. Emmet Walsh) challenges Dylan to race his best man and then tells his racer to cheat, Dylan and Melissa lose all the money. The Fat Man has a proposition. The Fat Man dares Dylan to enter an impossible, timed race. If Dylan wins, he’ll make the double the money that he lost and he and Melissa will be able to save the school. Dylan agrees. Luckily, it turns out that the school’s principal is also the legendary Fast Freddie, the only person to ever win the Fat Man’s race.

It may not be anyone’s idea of great art but Catch Me If You Can is still a delightful and fun 80s teen movie, complete with a nerdy sidekick who turns out to be secretly cool, a bad boy with a heart of gold and a mullet, and a big football game at the end. The plot doesn’t even make sense but the cast gave it their all and, as someone who took part in way too many car wash fund raisers in high school, I knew exactly what Melissa was going through! I’ll admit that, towards the end of the film when everyone was counting down how many seconds Dylan had to make it to the finish line, I got a little caught up in the moment and I may have even cheered a little. Catch Me If You Can is a wonderful slice of 80s goodness.

What can I say about this 2004 action horror film that can do it justice at just how it perfectly represent what I call a “guilty pleasure”.

Van Helsing by Stephen Sommers (him being at his most Stephen Sommersist) was suppose to be a new action franchise with Hugh Jackman as it’s lead. One must remember that in 2004, Hugh Jackman was still at the height of his popularity as an action star with roles as Wolverine in the X-Men film franchise and, in another guilty pleasure of mine, Swordfish.

This film was suppose to catapult him to the stratosphere and taking the action star role from aging ones such as Arnold Schwarzenneger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. Instead Stephen Sommers reached for that brass ring and failed, but did so with a mish-mash of horror properties blended haphazardly to give us a film that tried to be too much yet also not enough.

Hugh Jackman in the title role was more than game to try and prop up the film’s convoluted plot. Kate Beckinsale was stunning as usual and hamming it up in what I could only guess is here version of a Transylvanian accent. Even Richard Roxbrough in the role of Dracula, miscast as he seem to be in the role, gave a campy and scenery-chewing performance that his performance went past bad and circled back to being entertaining.

Yet, for all its flaws, I actually enjoy Van Helsing for what it was and that was a modern version of those Abbott and Costello mash-up with the Universal horror characters of the 40’s and 50’s. One cannot mistake this film on the same level as Nosferatu (Murnau, Herzog and Eggers versions) and Sommers definitely cannot be mistake for the three auteurs who had their own take on the abovementioned film. But Sommers does make thrilling, though some would say repetitive, action films.

Did I turn my brain off watching Van Helsing?

I sure did, but it still didn’t stop me from being entertained…and I cannot ever sat anything bad about a film with Kate Beckinsale in a tight black-red leather corset. It’s against some sort of law to do so.

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