Vampire Academy
(USA, 104 min.)
Dir. Mark Waters, Writ.
Starring: Zoey Deutch, Lucy Fry, Danila Kozlovsky, Gabriel
Byrne, Olga Kurylenko, Sarah Hyland, Sami Gayle, Joely Richardson.
Webster’s Dictionary defines a vampire as “a dead person who
leaves the grave at night to bite and suck the blood of living people.” Vampire Academy will change the way you
look at vampires. I thought they were evil. I thought they were sparkly. I
thought they died in the light. But no, Vampire
Academy is about vampires that are like ordinary girls. They have problems
and friends and fights and dreams and real world situations. Fans of Richelle
Mead’s books will love Vampire Academy.
Changes the way we look at vampires. OMG it’s so much fun.
A Dhampir named Rose, who is played by Zoey Deutch, must
protect the Moroi princess Lissa, Lucy Fry play’s her, and their back at school
after running away. Back at the school that they ran away from, Rose and Lucy
find out that Lucy’s boyfriend is cheating on her with a bitch named Mia and
then people start bullying Lissa because she hasn’t declared a magical power
yet. Fire, water, air, and something else are the powers but Lissa has other
powers too. Rose got powers too cuz she can see into Lissa’s mind when Lissa’s
talking with other people. People think Rose and Lissa are lesbians because
Rose let Lissa suck her blood when they ran away. But that’s truly what friends so.
Especially vampire friends! They’re BFFs.
Then there’s the missing teacher Ms. Karp and the evil
headmistress Kirova who looks like a real vampire but is really funny when she
gets stuck in the butt with a needle and says she could have been a model. So
much happens in Vampire Academy.
Mark Waters directed the classic movie Mean Girls so he’s truly the perfect artist to make Vampire Academy into a movie. It’s so much like real high school
but with vampires. Vampire Academy
talks about classic vampire movies like Twilight
but none of the guys are like Robert Pattinson. You don’t have to be on Team
Edward or Team Jacob. There’s the hot Russian trainer Dimitri that Rose is
crushing on but he’s old enough too be her dad. Creepy. Not like Woody Allen
creepy but it’s supposed to be gross. I wonder what Lena Dunham thinks of that?
I’d be on Team Natalie. Team Natalie is the best! Natalie’s
like that dorky girl in high school but she’s really funny and I felt bad for
her when her dad made her into a strigoi. But she’s believable as a moroi and a
strigoi. Actress is good.
It’s all about the friends, like Girls or Mean Girls. Rose
and Lissa are truly friends through thick and thin. There’s so many layers to Vampire Academy. It’s like an onion as
Mark Waters peels away the believable layers and makes it fun and comedy.
And it sets up Frost
Bite. That got me really excited!!!
Vampire Academy is
my favourite movie since The Book Theif.
Vampire Academy
gets four stars!
Review #2: by Cranky Adult Pat
Vampire Academy
(USA, 104 min.)
Dir. Mark Waters, Writ.
Starring: Zoey Deutch, Lucy Fry, Danila Kozlovsky, Gabriel
Byrne, Olga Kurylenko, Sarah Hyland, Sami Gayle, Joely Richardson
Someone drive a stake through Stephenie Meyer. Vampire
movies have run their course and each Twilight
rip-off is worse than the one that came before it. Vampire Academy, an utterly inane adaptation of the popular teen-lit
series by Richelle Mead, must have Bram Stoker rolling in his grave. This mindless
turkey sees Dracula descendants hit
rock bottom: Vampires have fallen even lower than M. Night Shyamalan has thanks
to Vampire Academy.
Vampire Academy betrays
just how exhausted teen-targeted fang fiction has gotten by devising a
ludicrous vampiric hierarchy in which vampires are not merely vampires, but are
dhampirs (half-vampire, half-human), moroi (some sort of vampire with royal
blood), and strigoi (vampires of the 28
Days Later variety). Dhampirs protect moroi from strigoi, or something like
that since the incomprehensible plot of Vampire
Academy puts dhampir Rose (Zoey Deutch) as the fearless protector of her
BFF moroi Lissa (Lucy Fry) as they crusade against a clique of mean girls and
cackling teachers who all have it in for Lissa for some unknown reason. (Moroi
have several elemental powers, but the students in Vampire Academy must declare one to harness. Lissa has a fifth
supernatural power of which the teachers all seem to want to take advantage.)
Vampire Academy
follows the lead of its bubbly dhampir and goes half-and-half with its generic
twist on the age-old vampire thing. Its part self-referential farce and part
revisionist genre-piece. Neither element works, though, for Vampire Academy makes endless tongue-in-cheek
references to the bloodsuckers that have come before it—an opening voiceover by
Rose sets up the differences between Mead’s vampires and the ones in Vampire Academy (they can go in the
light and they don’t sparkle)—while outlining an exhausting itinerary of unintelligible
dhampir jargon to make the film sound fresh. If it looks like a vampire and
sounds like a vampire, though, it’s a vampire. The canon of adolescent vampire
mush is just so overdone (and overdone so poorly) that even the slightest twist
cannot save it from feeling dead and rotten.
A uniformly terrible cast makes this brain-dead circus an
exceptionally painful watch. Sarah Hyland’s cringe-inducing turn as Rose’s
geeky sidekick Natalie and Olga Kurylenko’s bizarre appearance as the academy
headmistress are particularly worthy of Vampire
Academy dunce caps. Vampire Academy
makes the cast of Twilight look like the
ensemble of August: Osage County.
Vampire Academy
might have at least verged on the so-bad-it’s-good novelty had director Mark
Waters (Mean Girls) embraced the
idiocy of the material and gone full camp. Young fans of the books might be
pleased, but Vampire Academy is a
boring mess with half-baked execution. It never works as a satire of teen life
or of the well-trodden vampire genre itself. Waters pulls Vampire Academy in two directions as the film tries to please fans
of the source material and moviegoing audiences that are tired of seeing the same
dead corpse reanimated. Vampire Academy
sucks the blood out of every living thing it touches and fails to deliver on
both fronts. When the film sets up its inevitable sequel, exasperated moviegoers
are bound to emerge from the darkness of the theatre and step into the light hoping
they’ll disintegrate and never again have to endure a vampire movie.
Rating: ★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★ (out of ★★★★★)
Vampire Academy is now playing in wide release.
