The Wolfman is a modern take on the Hollywood classic dated 1941, starring Benicio Del Toro as Lawrence Talbot aka the wolfman.
The film starts with Lawrence leaving his acting troupe behind in America, to return to his ancestral home of Blackmoor in the English countryside. He is tracked down by his brother’s fiancée Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), who is desperate to find him after he disappeared in mysterious circumstances. In a massive and dusty mansion, he is reunited with his estranged father Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins), an eccentric nobleman. Lawrence is skeptical of his father’s warnings, but soon finds out that his brother was killed by a creature that haunts the woods on nights of full moon. And during a night investigating…drum rolls…he gets bitten! Scotland Yard detective Aberline (Hugo Weaving) gets on its trail to catch him.
The Gothic vibe of the film is provided by beautiful settings and the use of predominantly dark, grey colors associated to the English weather, including a creaking castle with cobwebs surrounded by woods and a stint in a Victorian London mental asylum, which gives the film just enough horror appeal. The story has classical Gothic elements such as the discovery of terrible family secrets, flashbacks of unhappy childhood, gypsies’ prophecies and longings for the untouchable woman, but that is barely enough to justify a weak, boring and tedious screenplay. Sure, the cast is superb, despite Hopkin’s indecipherable accent (it oscillates between English, Irish and American), but an episode of East Enders has more flare than this script.
Directed by Joe Johnston, who has worked on the special effects in Star Wars in the Eighties and directed Jurassic Park III, he gives it a physical and visual treatment, with well executed man-to-beast transformations but not much else. Del Toro is physically a perfect wolfman and does a good job at giving depth to his confused and broody character, but is penalized by other factors.
We don’t really give a toss about the disconnected flow of events or feel connected to the characters: you won’t jump, nor laugh, not cry in your seat, unless you are a six-year-old. Sadly, this movie is anything but scary or remotely gory despite labeling itself as a “horror”, which is what we would expect from a horror classic rendition. Yes, there are a few scenes of splattered guts flying around, but that is barely enough to honor the imaginary of someone as sanguinary as a werewolf. What a shame that this exquisite legendary tale on the curse of the lycanthrope has been turned into a mediocre, if not terrible, attempt to recreate a horror without any actual scary elements. And the film lacks in other departments too: the emotional involvement is flakey and flat as pancake, with holes and gaps filled by monotonous dialogues and unconvincing human relationships. Any chance of romance is killed off by the one-dimensional characters are far too distant from each other. I understand the decision to keep things classic and clean, but with an expensive production and great cast, there should have been something exciting, new and unexpected happing here. Imagination must have died somewhere along the way.
