Based on a graphic novel of the same name I, Frankenstein is an occasionally cool but ultimately enormously silly movie that squanders the small amount of potential it has in favor of CGI and nonsense.

After Victor Frankenstein’s (Aden Young) death, his creation Adam (Aaron Eckhart) buries the body in the Frankenstein family plot and is set upon by a gaggle of demons in the cemetery and ‘descends’ a couple before a couple of local Gargoyles come to his aide and deliver him in shackles to the home base of the Gargoyles led by Lenora (Miranda Otto) and her right hand man Gideon (Jai Courtney) an learns that Gargoyles are actually a form of angel that is on earth to send demons back to hell. What they don’t tell him is that the two gargoyles who found him, Ophir (Mahesh Jadu) and Kezieah (Caitlin Stasey), recovered Frankenstein’s note book, which looks like it was picked up at Barnes and Noble, which details how he made Adam and gave him life. Adam leaves and goes into seclusion for 200 or so years until demons find him again and he goes on a mission to kill them all. This leads him into a plot to recreate Frankenstein’s work by the demons, led by Prince Naberious (Bill Nighy). Adam meets the lead scientist on the project Terra (Yvonne Strahovski) and together they set out to stop the demons.

If your eyes went crossed or you nodded off up there, it is essentially a lot of words for what amounts to a back and forth between two sides that alternate being the bad guys with Adam going back and forth between their two hide outs fighting them. There are like four locations in the movie and Adam just keeps going back and forth between them fighting demons and gargoyles with blessed kali sticks. From a story perspective, writers Kevin Grevioux (who wrote the comic) and Stuart Beattie (who also directed) throw out a lot of terminology and jargon designed for texture and to make it sound like there is more going on than there is but what I, Frankenstein ultimately amounts to is a supernatural remake of Yojimbo with a large helping of silly nonsense.

Aside from the aforementioned silliness, I, Frankenstein feels very light and has very little substance to it despite attempts to meditate on the nature of existance and what it means to live and have a soul. There are some interesting ideas behind this but those ideas are not developed in any meaningful way instead settling on large action set pieces of winged gargoyle fighting demons with Adam stuck in the middle. Some of these fights would be really cool if you were watching an episode of Buffy (or given its quality I should say Charmed) but in a 93 minute movie they do not hold up. The repetition starts to feel like these battles are just obligatory time burners. This could be forgivable if the story, dialogue or character development brought anything to the table but they are as flat and soulless as Adam himself.

With a movie as effects heavy as this, with all the room given to watching things that are completely CGI, one would think that these effects would look good and have interesting designs but they often do not. The effects are occasionally good but more often than not it looks like you are watching cut scenes from a Playstation 2 game and the designs are uninspired at best and goofy at worst.

 

The performances are not terrible if you allow for the material they are given. I am a big Aaron Eckhart fan and he acquits himself well enough here outside of having agreed to the movie in the first place. Likewise Jai Courtney continues to impress but I really wish he would choose better material. Between this and the last Die Hard, I am concerned about where his career is going to go. Bill Nighy seems to enjoy chewing the scenery and does it well but again it is too bad he is saddled with this material. Yvonne Strahovski does what she can as well. I like all of these people and I wish I were watching them do something better.

 

There are some cool ideas here and I feel like there was some  potential for some depth and interesting concepts to be explored. It is too bad that the movie is more interested in repetitive fights and tiresome effects sequences. The handling of the story and concepts is completely bungled as well. I have not read the source material but I don’t have much hope for that either given the involvement of the creator here. This joins a long list of mostly anonymous supernatural movies like Legion that come and go without anyone really noticing. It is too bad. We need a better class of supernatural action.

Conclusion [ 4.5 out of 10]

This movie might be worth a look if you are a fan of the comic but I can’t imagine recommending it aside from that. The film is just so unbearably silly with no humor or awareness of what it is. I went in not expecting much and got even less than that. It is really too bad given the talent on hand to support it. In this case, the movie just didn’t support them back. I, Frankenstein is best avoided.