Painfully uneven, wildly silly, and occasionally interesting, this messy remake of the epochal 1941 George Waggner-Lon Chaney Jnr The Wolf Man is another object lesson in what contemporary Hollywood
The funny thing is there’s a consistent and engaging logic to many of the film’s developments, and what this film may have been originally intended as could have been an excellent modern spin on Waggner’s work. Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro), rather than a simple man who feels best working with his hands like Chaney’s, is here a Richard Mansfield-ish thespian who, it’s suggested, hides from his true self in acting, and is the offspring of his father Sir John’s (Anthony Hopkins) marriage to a gypsy woman (Cristina Contes). Her early, mysterious suicide haunts Lawrence, who left his home young and became an actor in America
Waggner’s film generated drama by exploring the shaded space between monstrosity and the mind, and, in spite of the familiar old-school expressionist stylisation, emphasised a modern sense of incredulity about the existence of the supernatural and a low-key sense of humanity. This The Wolfman presents a rural England
Director Joe Johnston’s ideas are occasionally suggestive, like staging Larry’s fateful mauling in a ring of standing stones, redolent of primeval forces still defining the modern world. The look of the film, especially in the first third, with its foggy forests and saturated shades of midnight blue and honeyed yellows, has a suitably haute-gothic sheen. Tips of the hat to several other werewolf movies apart from Waggner’s are evident: Larry’s costuming is based on Oliver Reed’s in The Curse of the Werewolf, a set-piece in which the werewolf-Larry rampages in Picadilly Circus quotes An American Werewolf in London in period setting, and the plotline of warring lycanthropes, one slightly worse than another, is cribbed from Wolf. But Johnston’s more ambitious visuals, like the regulation CGI London, an extended rooftop chase, and the climactic brawl of werewolves which fails to achieve any sense of clashing ferocity, look and feel interchangeable with the kinds of scenes found it most other special-effects-laden fantasy films of recent years. Johnston
Faults quickly proliferate beyond a redeemable point. There’s no sense of menace or sustained dread in the monster attacks, and gore effects are tossed at the screen with a childish showiness that entirely lacks an unsettling quality. It’s amazingly unscary – there’s one decent, unexpected gore shock late in the affair when Larry reenters his family home, but otherwise the film seems to have fallen victim to a studio push to get the gruesome money shots inserted regardless of tone or pace. Maleva, the gypsy who becomes Larry’s mother figure in Waggner’s film, is here reduced to a minor plot mechanism, and played by a totally wasted Geraldine Chaplin. Art Malik makes a momentary impression as Singh, Sir John’s Sikh servant, but his role is equally, irritatingly brief. Continuity goofs and story gaps litter the film, with a sloppiness that’s startling for such an expensive production, and Johnston leans on tired devices. How often have you seen a variation on the scene where a couple’s bubbling attraction is communicated by the man guiding a woman from behind to show her how to hold a gun or some such malarkey? Here it’s how to skip a stone across water.
Most unforgivably, the film has no grasp at all on the essentially tragic dimension of Waggner’s original. Where Chaney’s wolf man was anguished and conscientious when human but simply savage and indiscriminately murderous when transformed, here the filmmakers can’t approximate such fascinating duality. They instead render Larry almost heroic, by making most of his victims obnoxious, like consuming a posse of hunters who have insulted his mother’s memory, or tearing his way through the asylum keepers and quack psychiatrists who have tortured him. There was room to move there, in fact, in depicting a socially-created vengeful monster, but Johnston
