This started off like Dracula: Origins, and I thought, well that’s interesting, but it felt like Luc Besson couldn’t help himself by turning it into a spectacle that achieved less than hoped.

I have patchy history with vampire movies. I’m not really into blood stuff, which I think stems from fainting as a teenager in the GP waiting room after my first blood test. Like many others of my ilk, I got a bit obsessed with the Anne Rice vampire novels in my 20s and was outraged like everybody else when Tom Cruise was cast as the hulking Lestat.

I like the Gothic charms of Dracula though, and so made the effort to see Nosferatu not so long ago – I think my review of that one was basically style over substance and why are all the women so breathy and fragile. I was lucky enough to be accidentally in Melbourne with time to see a movie when Monster Fest was on and this new Besson version was the only one available on the night I had free. It had some credentials – Besson, Caleb Landry Jones, Zoë Bleu, whose name sounds a bit nepobaby so I was unsurprised to find out Rosanna Arquette is her mother.

It starts off in the 15 century in Romania with Prince Vlad (Landry Jones) seriously banging his wife Elizabeta (Bleu) and being so in love that they have to tear him from her loins to don his ferocious armour so he can go and fight the Ottomans. He makes some sort of angry pact with his priest (Haymon Maria Buttinger) that really sets up the whole movie. It cast him as a non-violent person (he is only going out slaughtering all of these enemies because the church is telling him to do it) and a man of love (he asks for a guarantee that his wife will be protected). You know that that’s going to be the sticking point.

I was pretty sure this dude was going to end up as Dracula, although there was a moment when a hook-nosed dark haired man left behind ogling his wife looks like another contender. Then we fast forward 400 years where a vampire, Maria (Matilda De Angelis), has been captured by a Van Helsing-like priest (Christoph Waltz) and Dumont (Guillaume de Tonquédec), a man of science, and she talks about her master. Father Van Helsing’s eyes light up because he is after the OG blood sucker.

I think what ultimately disappointed me in this loud, beautiful, visual, overwrought spectacle of a film is that it does nothing really different with the story. It’s one unique element is that it makes Dracula into a love sick victim, not something that I feel adds particularly to the story.

Bleu does a good job as both the original Elizabeta and the contemporary one, wife of John Harker (Ewens Abid) who doesn’t get much of a story. We are supposed to believe that she is somehow the reincarnation of Vlad’s wife and I struggled with how quickly she went from someone who doesn’t know this creepy dude to remembering all of their lovemaking from 400 years ago and being his devoted wife again. Although it doesn’t seem to give her any special gumption when the final battle happens, she is still the one screaming and gasping with no capacity to take charge of her life.

It’s possible that I nodded off a little bit in the long talky scenes in the first half. Although there are scenes of high drama, narratively it seems to drag, possibly because it can’t decide if Vlad is really evil or not. The story was at its best when it leans in to knowing humour and campness – the tower of nuns was my favourite scene and verged on music theatre parody.

With the copious amounts of time I had for contemplation while Dracula menaced and gave us puppy dog eyes, I wondered why it didn’t try to subvert the clichés, except perhaps by suggesting that men can be monsters but also misunderstood victims. And then I remembered that Besson has his share of controversy at the moment with accusations of sexual abuse and condemnation for dumping his wife Maïwenn (who plays the opera singer in The Fifth Element and who he met when she was 12, began dating at 15 and married at 16) for The Fifth Element star Milla Jovovich because of the “special chemistry (that) intensified during the filming of the movie.”

I want to see a contemporary version of Dracula that superimposes the creepy stalking of an immortal dude who bends women to his will against the real issues that women have today. I think someone needs to do a Clueless of Dracula.