"Interview With The Vampire" Review

Before Twilight (but after The Lost Boys) there was 1994's adaptation of Anne Rice's blockbuster novel, Interview With The Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (which no one includes the colon onward). Since today was the missus's birthday and she wanted to watch it, I got my second look at what I'd dubbed "Interview With The Whiny Vampire" because it's two-hours of Brad Pitt's Louis pissing and moaning about immortality while looking like early-Nineties Brad Pitt with a long blonde wig on.

Opening in present day San Francisco, we meet Louis as he's being interviewed by an incredulous Daniel Malloy (Christian Slater, Kuffs). Louis' tale then flashes back to 1791 where Louis, a wealthy Louisiana plantation owner, mourning the death of his pregnant wife and eager to die sort of gets his wish at the teeth of the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise, whose Digger just became the biggest bomb of his career). Now a vampire, Louis begins his two centuries of whinging about how lonely he is.

After feeding on a young girl, Claudia (Kirsten Dunst, Bring It On), whose mother did of the plague, Lestat turns her into a vampire and they raise her as their daughter. Apparently no one notices Claudia never seems to grow up over the ensuing decades hanging around New Orleans, but while Louis treats her like a little girl, Lestat raises her to be a killer. This backfires when, fed up with being permanently trapped in the body of 10-year-old (and not the buxom bod she'd inhabit as Mary Jane in Spider-Man eight years later), she tricks, poisons, and slashes Lestat's throat, apparently killing him.

Louis and Claudia decide to travel to Europe in search of other vampires but on the eve of their departure, Lestat reappears having survived after the pair had ditched his body in the swamps. Louis sets Lestat on fire, the fire spreads through the French Quarter, and the pair hop on their ship for the Old World. (There's a lot of big fires in this movie.)

Settling in Paris in 1870, they finally find some fellow fangers in the form of a coven of vampires who operate a Grand Guignol type theater led by Armand (Antonio Banderas, Tony) Things happen, vampires die, another big fire occurs, and then it's 1988, Louis has returned to New Orleans and encounters a weakened, decaying Lestat who's been surviving for apparently 150 years on rat blood. Huh?

Returning to the present, Malloy demands Louis turn him because he hasn't been listening for the past two hours as to the downsides of being a vampire. Louis refuses, but who should show up to offer him "the choice I never had" but a very healthy-looking Lestat (whut?) while Guns 'n' Roses absolutely butcher "Sympathy For The Devil" as the credits roll. (I'd remembered G'n'R had done this, but had blocked out how truly awful it is. Like bad karaoke by and for the deaf bad.)

Unlike the missus, I've never been a vampire aficionado. (When The Vampire Diaries TV series came out, I dismissed it as "Twilight: The Series" but she raved about it and I checked it out and ended up enjoying in and its subsequent The Originals spinoff due to its fast-paced storytelling.) And as noted up top my memory of the movie was it was Louis whining about being a vampire and that hasn't changed. AMC has made a TV series of Interview With The Vampire which I skipped, but I did watch the subsequent The Vampire Lestat sequel series (where Lestat is a rock star and the tour started in Detroit) and it was fun because it was trashy and, most importantly, he's having fun most of the time being a bad boy. (Yes, the series version of Louis is a bit of a bitch, too.)

Cruise has fun with the role, but it feels weird and too contemporary. Anne Rice, who adapted her novel for the screenplay, was very vocal about her displeasure with Cruise's casting, but changed her tune after seeing the finished film, praising it. I thought it was OK, but Pitt's Louis is still a whiny bitch. Pitt was hot after 1991's Thelma & Louise, but wasn't the established Big Movie Star Cruise was, but doesn't really make much of an impression here because Louis is a whiny bitch. The standout on revisitation is Dunst whom I'd forgotten was quite the murderette and she plays the conflicts of being a middle-aged woman in a child's body well.

Neil Jordan has never been an A-list household name director and was coming off the notorious The Crying Game when he directed this and he does what he can with the material, giving it an appropriately lush style with lots of candles and several big fires. But Rice's script leaves too many gaps which book readers know the answers to, which doesn't do the rest of us much good.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.