Besson grabs hold of Dracula and tries to give it a romantic spin-think Romeo + Juliet drenched in hemoglobin. On paper, fine. On screen? It feels more like a Wattpad fanfic crossed with a Cartier commercial. The prince of darkness loses his wife, renounces God, and becomes a vampire... except instead of being a vicious, tormented predator, he spends the film whining like Anakin Skywalker every time he loses Padmé.
Caleb Landry-Jones as Dracula is like casting Michel Drucker as Conan the Barbarian: it makes absolutely no damn sense. He's got the face of a guy selling metro tickets, not an unholy lord of the night. Christoph Waltz does his usual Waltz routine, but in "Friday paycheck mode," while the actress playing Dracula's eternal love overacts so much you'd think she graduated from the Shia LaBeouf School of Overdoing It.
Between the photo being tossed around like a soccer ball and the random gargoyles popping up with zero explanation, you can tell Besson dropped the pen after three coffees and finished the script freestyle, like a teenager on a Red Bull binge. At this point it's less a vampire's curse and more a Ubisoft glitch.
To be fair, visually there are a few sparks. The horseback ride in the snow, the shots of a decrepit old Dracula-you can tell the cinematographer put in work. But copying Coppola with nice makeup is like cosplaying Darth Vader with a mask from Wish: it impresses for two seconds before everyone realizes it's reheated leftovers.
The real issue? Dracula has zero darkness. The guy is supposed to embody sin, lust, the demonic... and here he's got all the charisma of a Twilight extra. Even Edward Cullen, sparkling like a disco ball, had more bite than this neutered immortal. Besson pulled off the impossible: he made Dracula boring.
In the end, Dracula: A Love Tale is like a kebab without sauce: it looks appetizing, but leaves you unsatisfied. Besson wanted to reinvent the myth; he just watered it down. A few shots keep it from collapsing completely, but with a botched cast, grotesque inconsistencies, and a Dracula stripped of menace, the result reeks of roadkill. Honestly, just rewatch Coppola's classic-or even Netflix's Castlevania. At least there, you feel the vampire's hunger.
