I don’t know what I was thinking. The terrible trailers for “I, Frankenstein” have been playing for months. It’s currently resting at an abysmal 5 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. On opening day, it only managed to make $2.8 million after costing $65 million to make.
I should have known better.
But somehow I found myself driving to the theater and reluctantly handing over the money for my ticket. For some reason, I felt compelled to explain to the employee at Forum 8 that I didn’t actually want to see this movie and asked him not to judge me.
And as I sat in the dark theater, not even 10 minutes had passed before I found myself quoting Gob Bluth from “Arrested Development.” I had, indeed, made a huge mistake.
Here’s the plot: Dr. Victor Frankenstein reanimates a corpse (played by Aaron Eckhart, who is known to everyone as the district attorney of Gotham City) and then tries to dispose of it. Enraged, the monster chases his creator to get revenge, and Victor freezes to death.
The monster is then attacked by a horde of demons before being rescued by a group of gargoyles, whose mission is to battle demons on Earth. The gargoyle queen names the monster Adam, gives him weapons so he too can fight demons, and then spends the next 200 years fending off the demons that pursue him. Adam soon learns that a demon prince named Naberius (Bill Nighy) plans to have demons reanimate the bodies of invincible corpses.
No, I am not making this up.
I don’t even know where to begin with this one, folks. The story is poorly constructed and incredibly incoherent. It’s incredibly fast-paced but still manages to feel much longer than its hour-and-a-half runtime. Ninety-three minutes of bad ends up feeling like three hours of bad.
There is no connection to the characters, no character development of any kind and no complexity. The script literally contains lines such as, “I think I wounded it. I think it’s wounded.” I don’t know what those people were doing on the screen, but it sure wasn’t acting.
Eckhart’s performance as Adam is as emotionless and boring as every other aspect of the film. Scene after scene, Adam stalks around, whacking demons with sticks while scowling and breathing heavily. Who would have guessed the man who played Harvey Dent in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” would ever stoop to this?
I think the real question is who could possibly have thought “I, Frankenstein” would be anything other than awful? Who got the bright idea to throw in gargoyles and demons with the legend of Frankenstein’s monster? Who thought it would be cool to have a modern-day Frankenstein fight hordes of demons? Who gave this movie the green light?
What it comes down to is this: “I, Frankenstein” is quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen in my life. “Movie 43” was better. “Scary Movie 5” was better. Even “Birdemic” was better. The year is less than a month old, but “I, Frankenstein” is guaranteed to be remembered as one of the worst movies of 2014.