Everyone knows Frankenstein’s monster died 200 years ago. What “I, Frankenstein” presupposes is: maybe he didn’t? This expensive-looking and deeply absurd genre turkey stars Aaron Eckhart as the handsome, five-foot-eleven, jeans-and-hoodie-wearing creature. He’s spent the last couple centuries helping the Gargoyle Queen (Miranda Otto) — yes, I mean queen of the stone ornaments found on old buildings, which in this world come to life, just like Disney’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and are actually angels — in her people’s eternal battle against demons.
The head demon (Bill Nighy), in corporeal form as a billionaire, is paying a foxy blond scientist (Yvonne Strahovski) to duplicate Victor Frankenstein’s experiments, allegedly for the good of mankind but secretly so he can produce an army of demonic reanimated corpses. He has a huge stockpile of corpses just waiting for the day, each already outfitted with a digital “_% REANIMATED” display across the chest.
Working from Kevin Grevioux’s comic book, director Stuart Beattie pretends the material has a chance of being taken seriously, even though it’s mostly just Eckhart stomping around talking in a growly Batman voice, CGI things impaling one another with stakes, and characters saying things like “Your life was not granted to you by the grace of God, it was fabricated in a laboratory!” and “I think your boss is a demon prince.” The film isn’t campy enough to be fun or smart enough to be good, but it passes by quickly and without doing any serious harm to the viewer.
C- (1 hr., 32 min.; )
