I, Frankenstein (2014)

Aaron Eckhart spends the runtime scowling beneath a stitched brow while the film around him explains a war between gargoyles and demons that nobody requested. The premise arrives from a graphic novel by Kevin Grevioux, and the adaptation keeps the plotting of a comic while discarding the wit. Adam walks out of the nineteenth century and into a modern city of glass towers and secret laboratories. He punches things. He descends demons. The camera shakes. A queen, a scientist, and a villain with a velvety accent orbit a screenplay that mistakes volume for momentum, and the result is a fog machine with a budget.

The cast is almost entirely white, a fact the film neither notices nor troubles itself to justify. Kevin Grevioux and Mahesh Jadu appear in supporting turns as a demon and a gargoyle, and neither role carries any interior life beyond the job description. Miranda Otto's gargoyle monarch and Yvonne Strahovski's electrophysiologist occupy positions of nominal authority, yet they function as set dressing with dialogue. Their presence makes no argument about who holds power or why. They are there because the genre requires bodies in the frame, and the screenplay has nothing to say about the bodies it borrowed.

A billionaire villain presides over the whole affair, which is the oldest shortcut available, and the film deploys it without a single thought about wealth, industry, or the people such men crush on their way to lunch. Bill Nighy runs a sinister institute and reanimates the dead, and the movie treats this as proof of evil the way a child treats a black hat. No economic idea is advanced. No moral instruction is offered. The creature wrestles with his soul for two hours, and the film never once asks the audience to wrestle with anything at all. That absence is its own kind of statement, though probably an accidental one.