Harry Potter-on-a-budget meets Twilight-for-tween-boys turned off by that film’s mushy stuff, the really really poorly titled Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant is a mixed bag. Following the adventures of golden-boy Darren Shan (Chris Massoglia) as he is inducted into the Vampire/Freak brotherhood by the hilariously coiffed Larten Crepsley (the really funny John C. Reilly), the film details the end of a truce and the looming epic war between feuding vampire factions the Vampires, who do not kill their human meals, and the Vampanese, who do.

Crepsley, tired of the battle, finds satisfaction in a traveling freakshow, led by the very tall Mr. Tall (Ken Watanabe) who also has a very oddly shaped head. It features Patrick Fugit as a green snake-boy, Salma Hayek as a bearded lady and a wide variety of other freakish, supernatural outcasts. Their peace is threatened by the puffy, gross Mr. Tiny (Michael Cerveris) who longs to see a final showdown between the feuding factions and puts into motion a plan to turn two one-time best friends, Darren Shan and Steve Leonard (Josh Hutcherson) into warring leaders of each clan. It’s very convoluted, and it’s clear that the film is based on a lengthy, multi-volume book franchise, as the book struggles inelegantly under the weight of exposition and back-story.

As is seemingly unavoidable with these kind of adaptations – adaptations aimed at an audience that the filmmakers may feel would be poorly inclined towards wholesale changes to the source material – the film is replete with moments that are obviously explicated plot points in some book somewhere, but sit like leaden, confusing lumps in the middle of the film. Darren is turned into a “half-vampire”, but it is never explained exactly what that means, or how the process of turning someone into a half-vampire differs from turning someone into a regular vampire. Who is Mr. Tiny? Who is Mr. Tall? What relationship do the magical freaks actually have to the feuding vampires? All of this is left unexplained in a film that already groans and staggers to a dead stop near the end of the second act, as character after character takes his turn explaining their take on the current state of vampire/human/freak affairs. It’s stolid, cumbersome and really only comes to life when Reilly’s Krepsley is on-screen. He comes close to saving the film, which isn’t surprising, as he and Willem Dafoe as fellow Vampire Gavner Purl are the only actors who put anything approaching archness or levity into their roles.

The film has a bunch of neat ideas, a bunch of neat moments, and a couple of great performances but it ultimately suffers from the cardinal sin for this kind of kiddie fantasy: it bores. There’s way too much going on, and the film spreads its real first-half momentum so thin, over so many different plot points and sub-plots, that the second half just grates and ultimately feels like a slog.

4.8/10