Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant: BD Review
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Page 1 of 3 Universal / 2009 / 109 Minutes / Rated PG-13 / Street Date: February 23, 2010 
Hoping to forge a place for itself as the book-to-film franchise that lies smack dab between the youthful wizards of Harry Potter and the brooding teenagers of Twilight, Cirque du Freak is an unavoidable, bona fide hot mess of a movie, one that neither makes a whole heck of a lot of sense nor is much fun to watch. It's got more black costumes and sourpuss faces than all of Team Edward combined, and a supernatural bent that hearkens to a Hogwarts-esque 'learn to love your inner non-human' narrative plot point, but Cirque du Freak is almost a non-film, a potential franchise kick-starter that never gets out of first gear. Its tale of friendship from beyond the grave has a hint of resonance - in a way, Cirque du Freak is an odd love story between one teenage boy and his male best buddy - but the way director Paul Weitz presents the tale leaves any kind of possible romantic provocation at bay, instead relying on been-there-done-that vampire movie cliches to propel his corpse of a film along, with little result.
In the picture, young Darren (Chris Massoglia) saves the life of his very best buddy, Steve (Josh Hutcherson), but this act of altruism comes with a cost: Darren makes a deal with vampire Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly, looking just like Chris Kattan from SNL's mid-90s "Goth Talk" sketch) to become half-human/half-bloodsucker, and joining Crepsley and his band of weirdos on the road. So as Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant moves along, we are introduced to this fringe-y world of outcasts and miscreants only to realize that the real push/pull of this world isn't freaks v. mankind at large - it turns out there's a second brand of vampire that poses the biggest threat to our big-fanged friends. So, yes - it's convoluted and redundant in its style: Cirque du Freak never leaves well enough alone, choosing to spend all its time chasing the dangling carrot of a hyper-complex plot rather than let us get any kind of vision as to who these characters are and what their lives are really all about. I'm sure teenage girls in every town in America who swear by the books neo-Twilight facades are prepping their DVDFile hatemail as I type this, but while sometimes great film art slips past the mainstream, I must say that the proof is in the pudding: There's a reason Cirque du Freak bombed at the box office. In a movie world where one can put a photo of Edward and Bella on a snow globe and sell a trillion of them, a teenage-vampire tale like this one should be a cakewalk. Instead, it's a trainwreck. |
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