Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant: Critic Reviews

Don't bother to take notes, because subplots go nowhere, and characters -- many played 
 by well-known actors -- barely get screen time.

Tests its viewers' patience even as it strives to build their loyalty.

Tod Browning's Freaks were the real thing. These are strictly CGI and the teen-vamp pose is beginning to pall.

Perhaps best of all, the movie doesn't take itself too seriously. It's creepy but tinged with sarcasm and infused with silly fun.

While it celebrates the creative and the imagined and introduces us to colorful characters, it's bland and dull.

Chris Massoglia is almost wholly charisma-free, a handsome, hesitant two-by-four who makes you appreciate the rich thespian skills of Daniel Radcliffe. Casting an unknown is always a gamble. This time the house wins.

The vampire trend continues, but the only authentic bloodsuckers in Cirque du Freak are its producers and studio execs.

While Twilight will make more money and get more attention, the darkly comic Cirque du Freak boasts the shaggy charm of the natural underdog.

Unreeling like a feature-length trailer, 'Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant' suffers from premature sequelitis.

It's ... a mess. The movie is shot through with curious disconnects. Often within a single sequence of events, we won't know where we are, or how they're related in space or time.

Mixing horror and comedy while minimizing the gore, writer-director Paul Weitz serves up a witty adventure fantasy with a tasty dollop of schadenfreude.

The film shuffles together episodes from the first three volumes of the 12-book Cirque saga, which may explain its rushed, patchy feel. It unfurls like a series of skits.

Harry Potter needn't call time out on his Quidditch game, and Edward Cullen can stick to his beauty rest.

The Vampire's Assistant is too busy making impossible claims about just how spectacular its sequels will be to serve up a self-contained story with a satisfying finale.

An inept fantasy that wants to be a sort of hip Goth legend...

The movie's big drawback is that it isn't silly enough.

The film can't decide whether it's an earnest fantasy flick or a quirky horror comedy, or whether it's meant for kids or adults -- no wonder it appears to have two titles.

We never get under the skin of anyone here. Freaks never become characters. They're objects of derision.

Cirque du Freak is disjointed and disorganized, and it meanders when it needs to gallop.

Is it too much to ask that a narrative film have a beginning, a middle, and an end?

A vampire movie in sore need of a transfusion.

The supernatural and its accompanying history of half-vampires and vampaneze never establishes itself as anything but ridiculous.

Jammed with story threads that don't cohere, Cirque commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It's bloodless.

Unfortunately Weitz can't quite get a handle on what the film should be, despite teaming up with the talented Brian Helgeland on the script.