"This is what happens when you spend pots of money on special effects but don't give a fig about storytelling."
-- Stephanie Zacharek, SALON.COM
"The film is an unending cavalcade of razzle-dazzle that becomes continuously less dazzling."
-- Philip Wuntch, DALLAS MORNING NEWS
"Has little that lasts in the mind for more than five seconds."
-- Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"A shrieking bore."
-- Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE
"A special-effects extravaganza that uses the barest of excuses to bring these characters together."
-- Desson Thomson, WASHINGTON POST
"Despite the rococo obsessiveness of its special effects and its voracious sampling of past horror movies, Van Helsing is mostly content to offer warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills."
-- A.O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES
"The experience of watching the film is best described as deadening."
-- Lisa Rose, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER
"A noisy, 19th-century fantasy adventure that goes nowhere."
-- Steven Rea, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
"The dashing Jackman plays his part well enough, but the script doesn't provide sufficient Indiana Jones-style bons mots to win us over."
-- Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
"Watching Van Helsing is like having a crazy guy yell conspiracy theories at you for more than two hours:"
-- Jeffrey Westhoff, NORTHWEST HERALD (CRYSTAL LAKE, IL)
"Churned hot off the assembly line, it's an ugly and disposable piece of ultra-expensive formula product that exists solely to kick-start a new revenue stream."
-- Scott Weinberg, EFILMCRITIC.COM
"A cacophonous mess."
-- Pete Vonder Haar, FILM THREAT
"Not comedy or drama, it's a travesty. In response to the immortal line, 'It's alive,' all I can say is, No, it's not."
-- James Verniere, BOSTON HERALD
"Aimed at people with the attention span of a kindergartner."
-- Lawrence Toppman, CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
"Whoever owns the film rights to The Invisible Man, lock your doors. Stephen Sommers is coming for you next."
-- Rob Thomas, CAPITAL TIMES (MADISON, WI)
"Monstrously bad...Sommers not only plunders the classic films for material but trashes what he's cribbed from them."
-- Frank Swietek, ONE GUY'S OPINION
"This isn't a horror movie, it's a sensory assault, full of flaming fireballs and shrieking banshees that make your eyes and ears feel as jeopardized as a vampire at sunrise."
-- David Sterritt, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
"This is a massively silly film, silliness on a grand scale, so silly and over-the-top yet simultaneously so emotionally flat and even dull."
-- Eric D. Snider, ERICDSNIDER.COM
"The film is weighted down by its sheer willingness to bludgeon viewers with never-ending sensation instead of trying to give them an interesting story or characters..."
-- Peter Sobczynski, CRITIC DOCTOR
"disjointed action thrillride that resembles what you'd get if you inserted crack cocaine into your PlayStation 2"
-- Phil Villarreal, ARIZONA DAILY STAR
"Possibly the biggest, loudest, dumbest summer-movie opener in quite some time."
-- Jeff Vice, DESERET NEWS, SALT LAKE CITY
"It's like celebrating James Joyce with a monster-truck rally."
-- Rob Vaux, FLIPSIDE MOVIE EMPORIUM
"Van Helsing desecrates the memory of our greatest movie monsters"
-- Christian Toto, WASHINGTON TIMES
"Van Helsing is more like Sommers' less amusing Mummy sequel -- longer, flabbier, and overloaded with bloated CGI interludes."
-- Gary Thompson, PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS
"There are bad movies, then there are really bad movies — and Van Helsing is even worse than that."
-- Dawn Taylor, PORTLAND TRIBUNE