Vampire Academy

Okay, can someone please tell me when vampire movies aimed at teenage girls became so dense, convoluted, and wordy?  This has got to be the wordiest screenplay I have come across since Ridley Scott's The Counselor.

Vampire Academy is one of those movies that's easier to admire for what it's trying to do, than for what it actually is.  It wants to be funny, and never take itself all that seriously.  It's just not all that funny.  The film is yet another adaptation of a popular series of novels aimed at teens, and like all the others, it hopes to become a franchise.  It also makes the same mistakes that a lot of failed adaptations have made in the past, in that it expects us to have a working knowledge of the book's universe walking in, and throws a ton of exposition, mythology, and made up words at us before it even attempts something that resembles a plot.  Will the fans of the books by Richelle Mead enjoy it?  I honestly can't say.  I did hear one young woman walking out of the movie say, "that was better than I expected it to be", but she didn't sound all that enthused, or that she had much hope for the film to start with.

I can't say much about the plot, or even if I understood all of it.  I did notice that it seemed to lift from a wide variety of sources, however.  The titular Vampire Academy is actually St. Vladimir's Academy, and acts like a private school for vampires to study the elemental magics of Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire.  The vampires who study this magic are known as Moroi.  They're generally friendly, and co-exist with humans.  How do they get blood, you ask?  Actually, they have willing donors.  The Academy's cafeteria looks like a blood donation center, where humans willingly sign up to donate blood to feed the Moroi.  The Academy also houses the Dhampir, who are half mortal/half vampire, and basically serve as bodyguards to the Moroi.  They're trained in martial arts to protect the Moroi from the third kind of creatures that exist in this world.  That would be the Strigoi, who are the nasty and evil vampires.  So, we have a private school for vampires to learn magic, and martial arts battles with evil vampires.  It's kind of like a Harry Potter/Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossover that nobody asked for. 

Our lead heroine is the sharp-tongued and sarcastic Dhampir named Rose (Zoey Deutch), who kind of comes across as what would happen if Kat Dennings became a martial arts badass, but kept her gift for verbal insults.  She is bound to protect the Moroi Princess Lissa (Lucy Fry).  As the film opens, the two are living on their own, and have decided to run away from St. Vladimir's Academy due to reasons that are really murky at first, and become slightly less so by the end.  We get tons of forced exposition dialogue from these two, but none of it makes a lot of sense unless, as I mentioned, you're familiar with the books.  The girls are tracked down, and sent back to school to continue their studies.  However, it seems that someone on campus has it in for the Moroi Princess.  Dead animals start turning up, and ominous messages written in blood keep on appearing on the walls.  Rose and Lissa have to solve this mystery, while still finding time for catty gossip, dealing with boys, shopping for clothes at the mall, and attending a big school dance.

The movie throws a lot at us.  Rose and Lissa have a psychic connection with each other, which allows Rose to see through Lissa's eyes when she is in trouble. There's a mean vampire girl who doesn't like Lissa very much, and tries to take the boy she likes.  There's a cute guy who becomes Rose's fighting instructor.  There's a teacher who has mysteriously gone missing, and whom the entire staff seems nervous whenever her name is mentioned.  There's Gabriel Byrne as an aging Moroi who is slowly dying of a disease.  There's a campus scandal that develops when its learned that Lissa used to feed on Rose when she needed blood during the time they were living together.  All of this information flies at us, but it doesn't carry a lot of weight, nor does it have much dramatic impact.  It's as if screenwriter Daniel Waters (who wrote Heathers, a much better movie about girls in high school) just kind of threw this stuff in his script because it was in the book, but didn't bother to actually flesh it out.

I mentioned earlier that Vampire Academy wants to be funny, and never takes itself all that seriously.  The girls in this movie are very self aware, and make a lot of jokes and puns about vampires.  They also like to rip on the Twilight series a lot, which would have been a lot funnier five years ago.  I'm all for a movie such as this having a sense of humor about itself.  In fact, I encourage it.  But I never laughed, or even smiled, once.  Besides, this movie is too busy explaining itself and its world to actually be funny.  It's a trend I've noticed in a lot of recent films based on Young Adult fiction.  These movies get so wrapped up in over-explaining themselves, hoping they'll draw in those in the audience not familiar with the books, that they take it too far, and just have way too many scenes of the characters standing around, explaining the plot in stilted and unnatural exposition dialogue.  I would take a shot, and say a good 60% or so of the dialogue is devoted to explaining what's supposed to be going on.  It didn't help me understand the movie that much better, oddly enough.  Actually, it just annoyed me.

I will close this review by saying that I did enjoy the performance by Zoey Deutch, who seems to be giving more than the material deserves.  Hopefully she will be able to land better roles, and she'll be able to look back on Vampire Academy one day, shake her head, and laugh.  I have a feeling that if this does happen, she'll be the only one thinking back on this movie years from now.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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