The most radical element in James V. Hart's screenplay for this $40 million Gothic banquet is to finally draw direct parallels between Stoker's mythical lord of darkness and fifteenth century Romanian historical leader Vlad the Impaler via a sumptuously mounted 1492 prologue that splashes across the screen in a wash of primary colours and gore, with the sworn defender of Christendom renouncing God for the death of his beloved Elisabeta.

Sticking as close to the source novel as suits, stiff-necked young lawyer Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) is dispatched from an 1897 London to visit with a mysterious Transylvanian count in his majestic castle. But once there, Dracula (Gary Oldman) senses that the Englishman's fiancé Mina (Winona Ryder) is the reincarnation of his late lamented bride, and imprisons Harker before setting sail for London and destiny.

This story is so oft-told that it's beholden to Coppola to at least reflesh old bones, opting for a blend of modern concerns - the rise of Islam, AIDS (inevitable in a film dealing this liberally in blood) and burgeoning female sexuality - with the more familiar creepy castles and crepuscular characters. The net result finds a partially liberated Ryder given one of those new-fangled typewriting machines to pursue her journal, and walking the crowded London streets picking up strange men (the ultimate strange man) at the drop of a hat. One of the project's prime movers, Ryder is consistently at odds with a cumbersome, mannered English accent, but retains the air of repressed Victorian sexuality that serves the film well.

Like the novel, Hart's script mediates events through letters, newspapers and journals where suited, almost intrusively for much of the early part of the movie, then abandoning in favour of more conventional narrative elsewhere. This and a veritable hailstorm of silent movie cutting and plot leaps serve the movie with a sense of Victorian melodrama in foundation and appearance and leaves space for the inclusion of elements all too frequently dropped, like Dracula's trio of brides or the blue fire rings that guard the castle. But here and there the melodramatic - scenes of Renfield (the awful Tom Waits) in Jack Seward's asylum, for example - can pitch so far over the top as to become ridiculous.

Coppola is aided and abetted in no small measure by Michael Ballhaus' tenebrous cinematography (he also shot Scorsese's Goodfellas), all reds (blood) and blacks (shadows). The net result, in feel, engages on the level of its chosen period, throwing in a number of neat touches, from Dracula's shadow that operates independently of its owner, to fever-dream logic, allowing Coppola to quote numerous cinematic references - Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast, Kurosowa's extraordinary battle epics, his own The Godfather (in the Harkers' marriage), and even Oshima's classic Empire Of The Senses in the final scenes between the doomed lovers, Mina and Dracula - the whole fuelled by Wojciech Kilar's outstanding, sumptuous score that touches base somewhere between Danny Elfman and The Omen.

Oldman's Dracula - over Lugosi (hardly a lascivious lead), Christopher Lee, and even Frank Langella in John Badham's rather insipid 1979 effort - is far more the romantic hero than shadowy creature of the night, allowing this re-examination of Stoker's hoary tale to tip into a love story. Sure blood is sucked and hearts staked, but Hart and Coppola never really resolve satisfactorily the balance between sexual fantasy and nightmare, opting primarily for the former and replacing the film's core of suspense with a half realised Gothic romance. Even given the confusion though, Oldman succeeds admirably in breathing new life into a role that runs from old man (echoing the ghastly Schreck in the Murnau, Kinski in the Herzog rebore), to dapper young Count about town, bat-creature, to wolf-thing. It's a potent, convincing performance that even sees a film Count finally lapsing into subtitled Romanian.

On the flip side, Reeves struggles as much with Harker the man as Harker the accent, singularly failing on both counts, leaving little impression of the substantial young actor so good in Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho. Far better is Anthony Hopkins' Van Helsing, which, although no less hammy than his Hannibal Lecter, brings to the rather dry vampiroligist something of the air of an irascible cigar-chomping Western gunslinger.

Ultimately Bram Stoker's Dracula does much the same for Coppola as Cape Fear did for Scorsese - it's a crowd pleasing, mega-buck restoration of sorely needed commercial clout. In attempting to accommodate everyone from novel purists to the teenaged core of the movie-going public, it doesn't have to compromise too far, but leaves tantalising hints of what might have been; a feeling that jettisoning a percentage of the commercial might have favoured the darker, more ambiguous European tone of a film like Harry Kumel's under-seen 1970 Daughters of Darkness. When all said and done, for all that it's hugely entertaining, this melting pot of blood and gore, style and sex barely scratches the surface of W.F. Murnau's scorching 1922 silent take on the legend that still remains the definitive, most genuinely terrifying of all Dracula movies.