By the late 2000s, vampire was the new black. Between the popularity of the Twilight franchise and HBO’s True Blood, bloodsucking hadn’t been this lucky since the Wall Street bailout. … Which brings us to another vampire-centric tale, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant.
Truncating the first three novels of Darren Shan’s YA book series, the flick boasts warring vampires, teenagers living on their own and an impressive array of carnival oddities. The only thing it lacks is bite. It’s a shame, too, because the movie squanders a lot of potential, flitting from tween fantasy to campy satire to would-be scares without registering as much of anything.
At the center are high school friends Darren (Chris Massoglia) and Steve (Josh Hutcherson). Steve is a juvenile delinquent from a broken home; Darren is a good kid, because, aside from a fascination with spiders, he appears to have no other discerning traits.
The buddies sneak away one night to check out a traveling freak show, the Cirque du Freak, and they (like us) are mesmerized by the likes of a scaly snake boy (Patrick Fugit) a bearded lady (Salma Hayek), a woman who can regenerate limbs (Jane Krakowski) and whatnot. For Darren and Steve, the main attraction is a world-weary vaudevillian who performs with a big, poisonous spider. Steve loves spiders, you see, but he also happens to be an expert on vampirism, and so he recognizes the performer to be a centuries-old vampire named Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly).
Darren steals the spider after the show, a regrettable impulse that winds up with him transformed into a half-vampire serving as Crepsley’s assistant. But Darren is a nice bloodsucker. He becomes ensnared in a vampiric civil war between the likable Crepsley and his ilk – predators who sip on, rather than kill, their prey – and a murderous sect called the Vampeneze. That ill-mannered group is controlled by an effete, fat fellow named Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris), who gets his evil mitts on Steve.
That’s only an abridged version of this overly plotted film tasked with cramming three books into 108 minutes. Writer-director Paul Weitz and co-screenwriter Brian Helgeland are pros but here they have barely enough time to shoehorn in bulky exposition and introduce characters who undoubtedly were expected to show up in sequels that never materialized.
As you might suspect, a sequel never saw the light of day, a phrase that isn’t usually a good circumstance for vampires, anyway. Cirque du Freak has its fun moments, but not enough of them to acquit a clumsy narrative, disjointed editing and murky action sequences. In the end, Cirque du Freak is a mess, and not even a particularly bloody one.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 