In 1795, Doctor Victor Frankenstein creates a new form of life by putting together parts of corpses and reanimating them. Horrified by his creation and considering it a monster, the Doctor tries to destroy it, but the creature survives and murders Frankenstein's wife Elizabeth. A vengeful Frankenstein chases the creature to the Arctic, but he succumbs to the freezing weather.
When the creature returns home to bury Frankenstein, it is attacked by demons. It proves strong enough to hold its own long enough to be rescued by two other supernatural creatures: gargoyles whose task it is to secretly battle demons on Earth and protect the oblivious humanity.
The Gargoyle Queen names the creature "Adam" and invites him to join them, but he has no desire to protect the humanity that spurned them and instead chooses to depart. For the next two hundred years, he lives apart from society, killing any demon that pursues him and hiding from the rest.
But this is a status quo that cannot go unchanged forever. The chief of all demons, Naberius, has plans to rebuild his army of demons to a point where they can overwhelm both gargoyles and humanity alike, and the key to those plans is the research of one Victor Frankenstein.
"Adam" doesn't trust humanity or the gargoyles, and many of the gargoyles now consider him a dangerous wild card, but they will need to find a way to work together, or Naberius will destroy them all.
My immediate reaction while watching this movie was "wow, there are lots of Aussies in this". It turns out it was a US-Australian co-production, and as an Australian myself, I'd like to tell you it is a great film.
I'd like to. But unfortunately, it's not.
The film's first sin is clumsy story-telling, with the emphasis on the telling. This is not a film that reveals things organically. It delivers lectures instead. We start with a longish initial narrative monologue, then after a brief break for some special effects we segue into lots of exposition. From about the 7-10 minute mark the characters basically do nothing but spout an end-to-end info dump of the core conflict of the film, its main narrative theme (is Adam a soulless monster?), and a neatly packaged summary of "here's how demons work in this story".
After which we get another round of monologuing. It's all rather a bit like watching cut scenes from a video game. In fact, Miranda Otto's Gargoyle queen character appears to exist largely as a video game style exposition-spouter and quest-giver / quest object. A central plot point rests on the her being kidnapped by a single demon. Admittedly a tough one who fights "Adam" to a standstill ... but why is she such a wimp when all her followers slaughter multiple demons each?
Also reminiscent of video games are the action scenes, which are much more concerned with spectacle than anything else, even if it makes the movie's whole backstory into nonsense. Demons burst into flames when killed, and when gargoyles die they ascend into the sky in a blazing beam of light ... how exactly has this conflict stayed "secret"? These guys are less subtle than the immortals in Highlander, and those guys made rocks explode with their swords!
So does the movie have any good bits? Well, Bill Nighy definitely seems to be enjoying chewing the scenery as Naberius, and is quite fun to watch in a hammy, over the top movie bad guy kind of way. And in among the generally clumsy story-telling beats there are even occasionally brief glimmers of humour. I particularly like the instance where, much like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a seemingly deadly bad guy is surprisingly taken out in moments. It genuinely got a chuckle out of me because this is not the kind of film where I was expecting it.
Overall though, it's really not surprising to me that this struggled to find an audience; it simply didn't do enough to make me care about the characters and their journey.
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