Tags:
Film: Frankenstein
Year: 2004
Director: Marcus Nispel
Writer: John Shiban
Starring: Parker Posey, Vincent Perez and Thomas Kretschmann
Review:
This film begins on a ship. There is an Asian man speaking with someone and then we see they are attacked. The Asian is killed and something is taken from him. We then see that the man that attacked him is Vincent Perez.
We then meet our main character, played by Parker Posey. She is a detective and she has a good heart. She has a little brother that has autism and he needs constant care. She picks up her partner, who is played by Adam Goldberg. They respond to a murder at a library.
When they arrive, they find another set of detectives there and they are given a hard time, the other two are played by Michael Madsen and Brett Rice. The man who is dead is missing his heart. Posey and Goldberg then go to check out his apartment to find that it is not taken care of very well. There is also a dark room in the back that has a ton of razor blades. We learn that the man was suicidal.
We also see that Perez meets with an elder black woman, played by Deborah Duke. She informs him that the person he is looking for has died during a mugging. They become friends living in an abandoned building.
We then meet Victor Helios, played by Thomas Kretschmann. He is planning a dinner party and we soon realize that he strives for perfection in everything. He is married to Ivana Milicevic, who is trying to live up to his standards, but she is falling short.
Posey and Goldberg get a call from the forensics and they needed to come to the morgue to see something. It turns out that the man that died was not normal, but evolved into something better. He had two hearts, one of which was missing. He has bones that are as hard as rock and he has other organs that would increase his natural abilities. Posey has been maintaining that this latest murder as well as others is done by one man, who she refers to as the surgeon for the precision that is taken to remove organs. All of the murders have an organ missing.
Posey goes back to apartment of the man that died and she meets Perez. He freaks her out and she is ready to arrest him, thinking that he is the killer. He lets her in on the fact that some of the things she believes are true, he tells her he isn’t the killer, but there is another one out there like him. He then electrocutes himself and disappears.
After Kretschmann’s dinner party, we see that there isn’t something not right about him. He has something wrong with his spine; I’m not sure if it was a tattoo, or him experimenting on himself. We also learn that Milicevic was created by Kretschmann. Not too long after this, he kills her and then makes tweaks, bringing her back to life.
Posey seeks out Perez in the building he is living in. She goes for his help to figure out who the surgeon is. Perez lets her in that Kretschmann is behind all of this and that he is 200 years old. Perez is a creation of his by the name of Deucalion and he is 200 years old as well.
If Perez is not the killer they are looking for, who is it then? Can they stop the killer before he kills more? Is Perez telling the truth about Kretschmann? Will he be punished if that is the case?
I have to say that I like this being a modern take on Frankenstein. There are a lot of literal versions of the film and I think that there needs to be something different done in order to keep making films on this novel. I believe that Perez and any of the creations could live for two hundred years and I wouldn’t be surprised if Frankenstein learned how to do it to himself, he would as well. Posey wasn’t bad, Goldberg is very sarcastic which I liked. Perez wasn’t bad, Kretschmann is a good bad guy and Milicevic is nice to look at.
Now I did have a lot of issues with this film. The first and most glaring is that they bring up the idea of Kretschmann making all of these creations, yet he is never dealt with in the film. He has minimal interactions and it is with none of the heroes. I felt like this film is not finished because there is no resolution or follow-up. I didn’t see the twist happening as to who the surgeon was, but I really never got into the film so I didn’t really care. The twist was interesting though. I felt Madsen was poorly used in this film. He is solid actor and he does have a big part in the film, but his character wasn’t fleshed out enough for me. I also didn’t understand why they introduce that Goldberg has a crush on Posey, yet he never acts on it and it is never revisited. It felt like they had all of these ideas and then just rushed to put the film together, never realizing any of them.
With that said, I would avoid this one. It has a really good concept, but the story of the film is incomplete. We do not get a resolution or a follow-up to get us there. There is some good acting and there is some poorly developed characters. The film didn’t draw me in either so I never really connected with the characters because of this. The twist of who the killer is was good. There are better modern updates to the Frankenstein story, so I would avoid this one.
My Rating: 4 out of 10