Vampire Academy (2014)
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Critics Consensus: Though it may appeal to its built-in fanbase, Vampire Academy's Twilight-meets-Mean Girls conceit borrows lazily from its predecessors and offers few laughs or thrills to complement its overstuffed backstory.
Critics Consensus: Though it may appeal to its built-in fanbase, Vampire Academy's Twilight-meets-Mean Girls conceit borrows lazily from its predecessors and offers few laughs or thrills to complement its overstuffed backstory.
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Movie Info
Rose Hathaway (Deutch) is a Dhampir: half human/vampire, guardians of the Moroi, peaceful, mortal vampires living discretely within our world. Her legacy is to protect the Moroi from bloodthirsty, immortal Vampires, the Strigoi. This is her story. (c) Weinstein- Rating:
- PG-13 (for violence, bloody images, sexual content and language)
- Genre:
- Action & Adventure , Romance , Comedy , Drama , Horror , Mystery & Suspense , Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Directed By:
- Mark Waters
- Written By:
- Daniel Waters
- In Theaters:
- Feb 7, 2014 Wide
- On DVD:
- May 20, 2014
- US Box Office:
- $7.8M
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Cast
-
Zoey Deutch
as Rose Hathaway -
Lucy Fry
as Lissa Dragomir -
Danila Kozlovsky
as Dimitri Belikov -
Daniil Kozlovskiy
as Dimitri Belikov -
Gabriel Byrne
as Victor Dashkov -
Sarah Hyland
as Natalie Dashkov
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– Rotten Tomatoes
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– Rotten Tomatoes
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Critic Reviews for Vampire Academy
All Critics (43) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (4) | Rotten (39) | DVD (1)
This is a garbage heap of weak quips, delivered by an assortment of pretty boys and girls and amped up with some cheesy moments of animal cruelty.
Not only plays like the crassest possible mashup of "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" elements, but seems designed to make those franchises look like eternal monuments of world culture by comparison.
This attempt to capture the magic of the "Twilight" and "Harry Potter" franchises tries too hard to pack all the backstory and borrowings into one film.
[Mr. Waters] doesn't seem especially interested in the supernatural parts of "Vampire Academy," and he clearly didn't have the budget to make what little hocus-pocus there is magical.
Ultimately more "Meaningless" than "Mean Girls," "Vampire Academy" is a busy, overcomplicated empowerment fantasy with more hormones than brain cells.
The only thing that distinguishes this teen-magnet wannabe from its predecessors is how lazily it appears to have been slapped together.
The action is underwhelming and the plot muddled, taking so long to explain the saga's complex mythology that there's no time left to flesh out the characters. Which is a shame, as Deutch's heroine has a sassy spark.
Rarely have I felt such disconnect between material and the actors tasked with performing it as I did with Mark Waters' Vampire Academy.
I died a little bit inside.
Richelle Mead's sharp series of young-adult novels might have been better off being adapted for longform TV, rather than the big-screen blunting they cop here.
Joining the painful list of Goth-drenched Twilight franchise wannabes - Mortal Instruments, Beautiful Creatures, Dark Shadows - comes a half-baked, yappy stab at blending sexy Undead girls into a teen high school comedy..Even hardcore Goths will be bored.
I thought it was a complete mess. I thought the teenage dialogue was puerile and that was a shame because Daniel Waters wrote the screenplay for HEATHERS, which is one of the really nice films about school but that was a long time ago.
It is so silly, so convoluted in terms of plot, but so insouciant that it almost gets away with it. Almost.
Despite an all star team behind the camera this is probably the first occasion where the film is literally impossible to understand without reading the novel first.
I really did try to channel the 17 year old high school girl within, byzantine, bitchy scheming an' all, but it's a stretch too far, and had to be content with enjoying the performances
The screenplay by Daniel Waters, the director's brother, is stuffed with puerile dialogue, all the more disappointing given that, back in 1988, he wrote one of the best school movies, Heathers.
Previous teen films from brothers Daniel and Mark Waters had a lot of bite, so it's sad their first collaboration is a toothless horror-adventure-comedy-romance motivated by The Weinstein Company's eagerness for a Harry Potter-meets-Twilight franchise.
It was almost touching to reach the end of Vampire Academy and find that it not only left itself open for a sequel, but seemed so certain of that eventuality that it set one up.
Vampire Academy occasionally plays as if it's on fast-forward, rushing from one moment to the next without providing much reason to care about what's happening[.]
I can't speak for Richelle Mead's novels, but I'm assuming they read like the instruction manuals for a role playing game: there are both too many, and not enough, rules.
It's not a complete disaster, but even the appearance of Gabriel Byrne, as Lissa's uncle Victor, fails to make much of a dent in the slapdash proceedings.
A fast-paced yet foolishly fanged fable...
When the dream sequence killing off the cast is better than everything afterward, you MIGHT have a script problem... This is why we can't have good vampire movies.
I'm happy to report that Vampire Academy is actually a pretty fun little flick that shoots for flip and actually lands there.
Audience Reviews for Vampire Academy
This was freaking awful, and not in a good way. I could barely follow it, and I read and enjoyed the series when it first came out. Lots of dumb action and woefully miscast. I did not picture Dimitri like that at all, and as soon as someone I watched this with said that Rose was acting like Kat Dennings's 2 Broke girls character, Max, it was all I could hear. (And I like 2bg).
MoreSuper Reviewer
Super Reviewer
Rose: A female - especially one who lives off of blood and magic - is going to have her mood swings.
Vampire Academy seems like it could have been a fun mix of meta-humor surrounding the recent wave of vampire and young adult novel themed-culture and satire dealing with high school drama. Unfortunately, this new film based on a young adult, paranormal romance book series (which I assume is a best-seller, because they all seem to be, regardless of whether you had ever heard of them before), has very little to offer in terms of wittiness, craftiness, or shrewdness. The film provides merely one character that has any life to bring to the film, two actors on the adult side to try and ham it up, and a ton of exposition that makes you feel like Vampire Academy will be providing you with a Scantron for the exam that takes place once the film ends. I can say right now, I didn't take many notes.
read the whole review at thecodeiszeek.com
Super Reviewer
The fans of the book will probably enjoy it but this is absolute garbage. You can really tell that everyone involved in making this movie clearly had no interest in the supernatural at all. Picture Harry Potter meets Twilight meets Mean Girls. It was so lazy and so carelessly slapped together. I actually died a little while watching this. Everything was a complete mess and silly, and not silly as in hahaha that's funny but silly as in WTF? Why are they doing that?? Best part of the movie is when the end credits start rolling and the lights in the theater come up, you could almost hear the cries of joy in the theater.
MoreSuper Reviewer
Vampire Academy Quotes
- Lissa Dragomir:
- You can't beat up everyone we have a problem with!
- Rose Hathaway:
- I can try.
- Spiridion:
- They say Dimitri is a God. Well, I'm an Atheist. An atheist with a big gun.
- Lissa Dragomir:
- Please don't say Vampire Academy, you know how I feel about the V word.
- Rose Hathaway:
- I don't know about you, but my school can get a little insane. Most of us stay up all night. And all of us think we'll live forever, if we survive graduation, that is.
- Rose Hathaway:
- No problem, what are sisters for?
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