“It’s a big, swashbuckling movie”: Hugh Jackman’s ill-fated attempt to channel his inner Errol Flynn
There’s a reason that most people haven’t heard of Hugh Jackman’s non-musical, non-superhero films.
Jackman is unlike any other movie star of his generation, as he has managed to earn multiple major accolades, yet still has a filmography that could be considered somewhat disappointing. He seems incapable of turning in a bad performance and is usually the best part of anything that he’s in, but his choice of projects has been notoriously spotty.
Jackman was first a stage star whose powerful singing abilities turned him into a phenomenon; even those who couldn’t care less about Oklahoma! understood how groundbreaking his performance as Curly was. However, he got his breakthrough in Hollywood in a much different way, as he earned the role of Wolverine in the first X-Men film back in 2000. No one would have predicted that, 26 years later, he would still be returning to play the clawed mutant anti-hero.
The actor is close to having Egot status, as he has won an Emmy, Grammy, and Tony and earned an Academy Award nomination for Les Misérables, a controversial adaptation that even the film’s harshest critics seemed to agree he was pretty great in.
Although he has continued to do great work in the X-Men franchise and picked up more interesting musical roles in films like Song Song Blue, Jackman often makes strange decisions regarding what else he chooses to spend his time on, and there’s no better example of this than Van Helsing, a reboot of the classic monster hunter character that was directed by Steven Sommers, who had previously made the successful The Mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.
Casting Jackman, who was just coming off the success of X2: X-Men United, seemed like a genius move. The Mummy had been successful because it brushed up against the horror genre, and yet still worked as a PG-13 adventure pulling in viewers of all ages, so Jackman’s intention was to do something similar with Van Helsing, even though he admitted it was the hardest film he had ever made when it came to physicality.
“The feel of is more about Errol Flynn than anything. It’s a big, swashbuckling movie,” Jackman said, “This is a fun movie, and if you can make it interesting to anybody over the age of 11, which is what we are trying to do, then you have got to have a little twinkle in your eye while you’re doing this.”
As noble as Jackman’s intentions may have been, Van Helsing was a box office flop that destroyed plans to launch a cinematic universe with sequels, spinoff shows, and other tie-in material. It may not have had anything to do with him, though, as Universal failed once more to launch a franchise based on their monster properties when the ‘Dark Universe’ collapsed after the failure of the 2017 The Mummy remake.
Jackman has shown he can be a brilliant actor when given grounded, serious roles. Between his heartbreaking turn as a terrified father in Prisoners to his wild performance as a high school administrator in Bad Education, he excels at playing deep and mysterious characters. It’s why his decision to spend his time on nonsense like Chappie, Deadpool & Wolverine, The Sheep Detectives, and Pan has always been so baffling, as he clearly has the potential to do so much more.
