You, nincompoop

I, Frankenstein has a premise that can send comic-book nerds everywhere—excuse me, make that “graphic-novel enthusiasts”—into transports of ecstasy, especially if they never quite managed to crack Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Like Victor Frankenstein’s creature, the movie is stitched together from odds and ends of once-living elements, only this time, the elements are remnants of such pop-culture fantasies as the Underworld and Twilight sagas.

The stitching has been done by director Stuart Beattie and his co-writer Kevin Grevioux, based on Grevioux’s graphic novel (it’s no coincidence that Grevioux also created Underworld). I, Frankenstein is a sequel of sorts to Shelley’s book, which ends with the creature eulogizing over his creator’s corpse, then springing from the sailing ship where Frankenstein lies and being “borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”

In the movie, the creature (Aaron Eckhart) brings Frankenstein’s body with him, returning to Europe and burying Frankenstein in the family plot. (Jolly decent of him, I say.) No sooner does he get the body planted than he’s attacked by a group of morphing creatures, one of whom snarls, “Naberius wants him alive!”

The creature holds his own for a while in the fight, but is ultimately rescued by a band of other creatures who spring to life from the gargoyles of a nearby cathedral. It turns out it’s all part of a war going on right under the noses and outside the consciousness of the human race. (In fact, human beings hardly even appear in the movie.) On the side of good are the gargoyles, actual stone sculptures that come to life and battle the evil demons. The gargoyles are led by Queen Leonore (Miranda Otto), and they urge the creature—whom the queen names Adam—to join the battle against the demons and their leader Naberius.

In time-honored I-stick-my-neck-out-for-nobody Bogart fashion, Adam refuses and goes his own way. And his way is a long one; it’s the movie’s conceit that, as an artificial being with no immortal soul, Adam’s immortality resides in his manufactured body. So we dissolve from the 1790s to more than 200 years later. Adam is still around, still stalking the dark world, and the only change in him is that he’s now sporting a military haircut that makes him look like Kurt Russell in Escape From New York.

Naberius is still around, too, of course, going under the name of Charles Wessex, billionaire, and played by Bill Nighy. Naberius/Wessex is financing experiments by Dr. Terra Wade (Yvonne Strahovski), a sexy blond biologist (is there any other kind in movies like this?). The experiments are in reanimation, and Terra succeeds with a rat, but Wessex wants to move on to humans, as Victor Frankenstein did. For her part, Terra dismisses Frankenstein’s creation as a myth.

She soon learns better, of course. Frankenstein and his accomplishments were real, and his “son” Adam is still around. More important, all these years he’s been lugging around Frankenstein’s notebook with the secrets of his success. Naberius wants that book. His plan is to inject 10,000 corpses with the spirits of his demons rescued from hell and to annihilate the gargoyles once and for all.

So Adam, the demons and the gargoyles—immortals all—pick up more or less where they left off 200 years earlier, in the usual storm of CGI fire-and-brimstone battles. This time, the mortal Terra is working with Adam to try to learn what Wessex/Naberius is up to.

The alliance between Adam and Terra gives the utterly humorless I, Frankenstein it’s one moment of (unintentional) mirth. When Terra gets an eyeful of Adam’s sculpted torso, scarred and stitched but buff as any other action hero. As the lissome blonde ogles him, it’s impossible not to smile at the memory of Madeline Kahn’s similar moment in Young Frankenstein (“Oh, woof!”).

“Woof” indeed, and in more ways than one: I, Frankenstein is a real dog. But I’m grateful for that glimpse of Strahovski giving Eckhart the once-over. It reminded me of a far better movie that I’ve gone too long without seeing.