To say that “I, Frankenstein” was a waste of time would be an understatement. Let’s talk plainly here… A toddler/ dog/ cat could have seen this trailer and automatically knew this wasn’t going to be a Hollywood masterpiece. This movie is about Gargoyles, Demons and Frankenstein!!! The dialogue looks stupid and clichéd, the action looks boring and uninspired, even the actors look bored and uninterested. I even asked myself if the movie was made BY middle school children FOR middle school children.
Set in modern times, Frank is over 200 years old and gets caught in the middle of a war going on between gargoyles, demons, and other fantastical characters. Clearly this isn’t Karloff’s “Frankenstein”; it’s more in the vein of stylized Gothic action films like “Underworld” or” Blade”, but in a more “fail” , than “win” situation. Gone is the stumbling, sympathetic horror of the Mary Shelley; instead we have a Batman-wannabe shooting for mysteriously cool, and coming off as just lazy and unrelatable kitsch protagonist.
All of the fight scenes are bland and dull with redundant, badly executed CGI. Perhaps the most frustrating example of this is that every time a demon is killed on screen, it turns into a swirling fireball. This effect looked cool for about a minute and it quickly got stale, especially when the demons are dying left and right and the effects start to look like they’ve been copied and pasted.
“I, Frankenstein” is not a TOTAL mess. The film does contain some impressive special effects, as well as a cast of reasonably well-known actors that help the audience to trudge through the incredibly predictable and uninteresting story.