Literary purists — whomever or whatever they are — will no doubt be puzzled to find Abraham Van Helsing serving as the model for Hollywood’s latest chiseled, leather-clad action hero. As originally written in Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic novel “Dracula,” Van Helsing is elderly, bookish and, well, Dutch. Hey, the Dutch are great at painting tulips, but action? Never the twain shall meet.

It makes you wonder what unlikely literary figure writer-director Stephen Sommers (“The Mummy”) will reconceive next. Maybe Peter Abelard can do battle with flesh-eating zombies, or team up with Madame Bovary to slay ancient Mongolian dragons. It could star Brendan Fraser and Brittany Murphy and have a $300 million budget and get a leg up on the summer movie competition with a mid-February release.

The point is, anything seems possible with Sommers and his wily monster-movie imagination. Consider “Van Helsing,” a delirious cyclone of an action movie that grabs up bits of ‘‘Dracula,’’ ‘‘Frankenstein’’ and ‘‘The Wolf Man’’ and shoots them out like silver bullets. Despite Sommer's usual taste for convoluted storylines, it’s a brash, imaginative and ticklishly fun hell ride that ranks as the best of his career.

As played by “X-Men” star Hugh Jackman, this Van Helsing bears scant resemblance to, say, the version played by Anthony Hopkins in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992). Sommers has changed his first name to Gabriel, attired him in a smooth leather duster and equipped him with a host of James Bond-style gadgets, including a gas-powered crossbow that spits out arrows like a Gatling gun. Whenever Van Helsing ices a bad guy (in the exciting opening sequence, he duels Mr. Hyde in a Parisian belfry), he crosses himself, Sammy Sosa-style.

Like Jackman’s Wolverine character in “X-Men,” Van Helsing remembers only bits and pieces of his past and labors in the employ of a secret Vatican order, hoping to recover his memories. His proficiency at his job — killing dangerous monsters and assorted demons — has unfairly earned him international repute as a cold-blooded killer. Only his friends at the Vatican, including a wise-cracking friar named Carl (David Wenham from “Lord of the Rings”), know the truth.

Alarmed by paranormal activity in eastern Europe, the Vatican dispatches Van Helsing to Transylvania, where the infamous Count Vladislaus Dracula (Richard Roxburgh from “Moulin Rouge”) is hatching plans for a nefarious vampire-breeding program. The scheme involves Frankenstein’s Monster (Shuler Hensley), which sounds like a stretch at first but proves to be one of the movie’s more ingenious plot points.
Alighting on Transylvania, Van Helsing joins forces with Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale from “Pearl Harbor”), a luscious Slavic bombshell whose entire family has been wiped out by Dracula, something to do with a centuries-old vendetta. Van Helsing and Anna have not just Dracula to contend with, but also three of his fanged, winged mistresses (including one played by Sports Illustrated swimsuit vamp Josie Maran) and Anna’s own brother Velkan (Will Kemp), who Dracula has transformed into a werewolf.

Roxburgh is a Eurotrash riot as Dracula, playing the villain like a 19th-century pimp-daddy who sends his brides into shrieks of fear and ecstacy with the merest flip of his ponytail. Jackman is adequate — if blandly heroic — as Van Helsing, whose murky history is never fully illuminated, leading one to believe that Sommers is saving that particular nugget for a possible sequel.

Though the tempo flattens out just a bit leading up to Van Helsing's climatic showdown at Dracula's snowbound lair, the movie is consistently gripping throughout. It's also one of the most purely scenic genre movies in recent memory, combining extraordinary special effects with brooding, stormy matte backgrounds. Scenic also is Beckinsale, formidably sexy in a leather bustier than would reduce a lesser man than Van Helsing to tears.