Macabre Cirque du Freak a Lifeless Mess
Other than being undead, teenager Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia) is your typical teenager. Unfortunately his conniving best friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson) got himself bit by a circus performer’s pet spider, and in order to save his life Darren was forced to do something drastic. You see, the owner just happened to be immortal vampire Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly), and his asking price for the little malcontent to get the antidote just happened to be the more kindhearted teen’s humanity.
John C. Reilly and Chris Massoglia in Universal Pictures' Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
Yet Crepsley’s reasons for exacting such a high price weren’t completely without merit. Turns out the mysterious Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris) has his eye on Darren, positive the boy is the key ingredient in helping him and his malevolent assistant Murlaugh (Ray Stevenson) bring on the apocalypse. Crepsley makes the boy a vampire to keep this from happening, never expecting that the powerfully evil villain with a yen for destruction will transform Steve in the same manner in hopes of pitting one teen against the other.
Based on author Darren Shan’s series of popular young adult fiction, the new movie Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant is filled with so many characters and so many plot threads trying to connect all the dots is enough to give a person a headache. People come, go, come back again, disappear, reappear and than vanish into nothingness so quickly it’s hard to tell sometimes if they’re worth the bother of keeping track of. The film is a convoluted mess of ideas and mythology, and while all of it is potentially interesting none of it is fleshed out near well enough to make any of it even slightly worthwhile.
Frustratingly, this film is just another in a long line of feature-length coming attractions segments to sequels we are never going to get the opportunity to see. Like Jumper, Eragon, The Golden Compass and so many others before it Cirque du Freak is so obsessed with setting up its world and giving a glimpse to the characters who live inside of it that it forgets to tell an interesting story. The whole thing is one gigantic prologue, and much like those “previously seen on” segments right before the start of your favorite television show all the film does is wet your appetite for what is about to happen next.
The problem is there will be no next. If Universal Studios and director Paul Weitz (who also wrote the screenplay with fellow Oscar-nominee Brian Helgeland) thought they had a franchise on their hands they’ve got another thing coming to them. This movie is hugely disappointing, and the chances of the studio making enough money to warrant a sequel are pretty much slim and none.
Pity, because they’ve certainly cast things well, and I like that the film revels in its PG-13 rating and doesn’t try to pander downwards in order to excite a prepubescent audience. I also think there are lots of neat ideas here, and while many of them aren’t all that new (there are two clans of blood-sucker, the peaceful non-murderous vampire and the evil human-killing vampaneze) the twists Shan has put on them all certainly is.
If only Weitz, Helgeland and company did anything of interest with any of them. They introduce the members of the Cirque du Freak with as much excitement as if they were flipping through a badly drawn popup book, while the central conflict itself is so vague it might as well be nonexistent. There is no weight to the movie, everything so one dimensional and threadbare making an emotional investment in the outcome is next to impossible.
What else is wrong? Steve, as hard as the talented Hutcherson (so good in Bridge to Terabithia) tries to make him otherwise, is an ass, and even before the movie was half over I was kind of wishing Darren would have let the spider’s venom kill him. Speaking of the main character, Massoglia spends the entire film as a virtual wallflower, and even when he’d ultimately forced into action the actor seems so disinterested he might as well be ordering a sandwich instead of fighting vampaneze vampires.
Not that the action scenes help him at all. Watching nebulous blobs whip about the screen apparently smacking one another upside the head isn’t what I’d call a good time and doesn’t promote much in the way of excitement. There is nothing eye-popping or engaging about super fast blurs of light, and while I thought we learned that lesson after Jumper I guess the filmmakers didn’t get the memo.
But worse then all of this is the simple fact that the movie is nothing more than a preamble. Nothing is resolved here, there are no lessons learned and little is won or lost. All Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant was missing was a “to be continued” scrawl before the end credits, the cliffhanger so blatant I could almost hear the collective groan of the preview audience before they had the chance to emit it. It is another in a long line of potentially intriguing wastes of time, a lifeless mess I’m just happy to be done with.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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