Zoey Deutch has a lot going for her. She is the daughter of actress Lea Thompson and "Pretty in Pink" director Howard Deutch. She delivered a wonderful performance in last year's underrated "Beautiful Creatures". She displays a sharp and quick-witted intelligence that is all but absent in today's young generation of actors. She would feel right at home with a fast-paced Sorkin series or even the second-coming of "The Gillmore Girls". Deutch is also gorgeous enough to make you She is also the only good thing about "Vampire Academy", a pathetic hodge-podge of other series that is among the worst films to come out in years.
Rose Hathaway (Deutch) is a Dhampir, a half-human/half-vampire who is sworn to protect her best friend Lissa Dragomir (Lucy Fry). Lissa is a Moroi, a peaceful, full-vampire who practice magic. The two are brought to St. Vladimir's Academy, a school for Moroi to practice and train their skills, where they had escaped two years earlier. The reason for their escape is not initially known but it is clear that the two are over the drama that comes with teenage vampire life. Shortly after they return, scary things start occurring in the form of attacks by the Strigoi, a group of evil vampires. Rose and Lissa must fight off catty classmates, bad boyfriends, and the Strigoi to make it through the Academy in tact.
"Vampire Academy" is so sloppily edited that the narrative flow is akin to falling asleep while the movie is playing. You seem to only get bits and pieces of who everyone is, what is happening, and why it is happening. The whole thing almost seems like a dream that you put together out of the remnants of other stories. You almost expect to wake up and tell someone "So... uh... it was like a Harry Potter school filled with Twilight kids... and they acted like they were in Mean Girls... but they were magic. The vampires... were magical." On paper the story the mismatch of already successful story ideas sounds like nothing more than a movie studio or book company throwing everything into a pot and hoping it creates something edible. What you get is this misshapen mess of half-cooked ideas that insults you by thinking you'd be interested in it. The story thinks you are stupid and don't need originality and logical plot points. They believe you (or more than likely teenage girls) will just lap up whatever concoction they put in front of you. I would imagine (or would like to think) that audiences are smarter than that.
The widespread selection of accents doesn't come off as globe-trotting or diverse. Instead, it comes off like they filmed in the cheapest areas they could and hired the closest actors they could. They flew in a few native English speaking actors who weren't already busy acting in straight-to-DVD films and just took foreign actors who could moderately speak English well. Danila Kozlovsky, the male love interest of Rose, speaks English far better than I could ever imagine speaking Russian but it is still difficult, if not impossible, to understand what he is saying. Hopefully the filmmakers didn't just count on his "dreaminess" to overshadow the lapse in comprehension. Considering the other flaws in the plot, I'm not entirely ruling it out.
The screenplay of "Vampire Academy" commits the sin of thinking it is incredibly clever. It never thinks the plot is clever but is thoroughly invested in believing the dialogue is fast-paced and witty. It comes off like an amateurish teenage writer who is desperately trying to impress the audience with how snarky she can be. Cultural references fly at you hoping you will think they are cool. No doubt they will date the movie terribly when in ten years nobody cares what a "hashtag" is. Hopefully nobody will even remember this film existed. The dialogue also is shockingly awkward. A character out-of-nowhere asks if another character had been "fornicating". The word "fornicating" is used multiple times. You can't expect me to believe your teenage characters live in a world with Twitter and yet use such antiquated and awkward words. These pieces come off a faulty Google Translate version of a foreign script where they simply forgot to double-check the dialogue before they started filming.
"Vampire Academy" is one of the sloppiest excuses for a film that I've seen come out in some time. Maybe the problem lies in the original source material but that definitely can't be the only area that is to blame. It is a wonderful example of a January film that will be buried and no doubt stay dead.
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