“I am a demon prince! You will kneel to me!” This quote, in addition to many others, fills the movie “I, Frankenstein” to the brim with absolute absurdity. The film tells the story of Viktor Frankenstein’s monster, called Adam (Aaron Eckhart, “The Dark Knight”), as he is repeatedly attacked by legions of demons and called to ally with the Order of the Gargoyles. Yes, those gargoyles that sit stoically upon churches can turn into very attractive and muscular men and women when they feel like shaking off their stone exteriors. The demons also seem to have a sleek sense of style, as they adorn their leather jackets or three-piece suits—but they should probably choose to keep their human masks on.
The story is relatively simple—Adam had a pretty bad experience with humans, so the prospect of protecting them alongside a group of gargoyles seems worthless. That is until he meets the beautiful Terra (Yvonne Strahovski, “Chuck”), who manages to see through his grotesque face and into his troubled soul. Of course, Adam is not really that grotesque—Frankenstein had obviously managed to pick the body parts from the buffest corpses, so Adam is stuck sporting a pretty sick six-pack. Terra is the head scientist of a team working on reanimation of dead animals and she soon discovers that her employer is not a rich philanthropist who wants to bring dead dogs back to life, but rather a demon prince who wishes to reanimate corpses and put demons inside them. She probably missed some major clues about his true identity before the timeline of the film. Adam must team up with the Gargoyle Queen Leonore (Miranda Otto, “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King”) and her minions to take down the demon prince Naberius (Bill Nighy, “Love Actually”) and his followers.
With such a stellar cast of actors, such as Eckhart, Nighy and Otto, “I, Frankenstein” should have been somewhat salvageable, but the writing and music prove to be even stronger deterrents. It is difficult to say which is more painful: The high pitched opera music over fight scene choreography or Eckhart’s continual voiceovers about the flaw of humans. Not to mention the clichéd Terra, who continually insists that everyone call Adam “him” instead of “it.” This small courtesy is not going to take away the years he spent in the wilderness with only himself as a conversation partner—he is probably not too nit-picky on the whole pronoun issue.
Typically, movies of such fantasy genre attempt to distance themselves from reality, but this film centered around the fact that the war between demons and gargoyles was hidden from the human world for their protection. It becomes especially absurd when intelligent characters like Terra start referring to the Gargoyle Queen as a serious matter rather than scoffing over it like anyone actually would. The only likeable and believable character in the whole movie is that of gargoyle Gideon (Jai Courtney, “A Good Day to Die Hard”). He is phenomenally untrusting of Adam and continually puts up a good fight against demons, yet he ends up dying about halfway through the film. His distrust of Adam proves to be substantial, since Adam is the one who eventually kills Gideon. Thus, the character who the movie should have been made about drifted off screen on his way to heaven. If only “I, Frankenstein” had ended then.
The single redeeming factor of this movie is the attractiveness of the actors, who typically walk around in sleeveless shirts, bearing their well-toned arms. But even some awesome biceps will not bring back the 92 minutes and $9.50 wasted on this film.
