The Wolfman

The Wolfman

102 Minutes

Let me mitigate the above rating with this: The Wolfman works exactly in the way that it should. In other words, the scenes with the eponymous lycanthrope deliver the goods in a spectacular, almost beatific way as if trying to make up for the last decade, which saw werewolves in Matrix-style human form fighting vampires with machine guns when they weren't shirtless hunks traipsing around in the woods -- again, fighting vampires. Van Helsing did irreparable damage on vampire-werewolf relations. Fuck that. Director Joe Johnston understands the allure of a good ol' fashioned monster movie, so the Wolfman tears apart attacker and innocent bystander alike with huge splashes of blood, leaving intestines and body parts strewn about. Moreover, some of these body parts make one last movement as they hit the ground. You haven't seen a dismembered arm until you've seen a dismembered arm fire a gun as it thuds in the soil.

Shame that the scenes in between the good bits are workmanlike at best and dull at the worst -- and more often the latter. It doesn't help that much of the film is rendered in a dreadful muted palette as if to note which scenes are boring. That Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven) and David Self (Road to Perdition) were behind the typewriters for this kind of dreariness is shameful. These guys probably know better and the film was rife with creative struggle, so who knows what they originally wrote. The boredom isn't too fatal to the film because thankfully someone -- Universal? The chorus of editors who struggled with the movie in post? -- decided that The Wolfman didn't need to be two and a half hours, because I was totally set to ward off sleep. Instead I was pleasantly surprised to be out in the cold night after a bit more than 90 minutes.

We can't blame the actors for the material. Benicio Del Toro is appropriately brooding and tortured for a guy who turns into a monster, but unfortunately it's a bare bones role that offers little else as far as character goes, making it pretty easy to imagine Christian Bale delivering the same exact performance, but with more barking. Emily Blunt as the obligatory love interest is about as thankless as her character is perfunctorily written. To Anthony Hopkins this sort of role is a vacation, meaning he has a ball as the totally crazy Father of Wolfman. It's hard not to see a missed opportunity in Hugo Weaving's Inspector Aberline, the real-life detective famous for working on the Jack the Ripper case. He's the villain of the piece, but a character with something to prove, considering the last string of murders he investigated went unsolved. The film hints at this kind of character arc, but in the interest of fast pacing doesn't bother to delve into it.

Save for maybe the color scheme, my boredom is hardly the fault of Johnston, who took over from One Hour Photo's Mark Romanek (oh, what could have been) two weeks before production began. That the action scenes -- along with a fantastically nightmarish torture scene at the insane asylum -- are so striking and effective implies that Johnston came in and brought ideas and actual vision to the parts people were actually going to remember. The stuff that screenwriters gloss over in the script: "Chase scene. Bad guys shoot at Wolfman. He kills some people. He escapes into the night." You see where his interests lie, and what he brought to the film.

Still I say, those exciting, frenzied action scenes stay with me and become reason enough to give the film a pass and even a recommendation -- with a huge caveat, of course. I can't wait to see The Wolfman again, but next time it'll on my own terms: on DVD with some beer and friends to talk over the boring parts.

by Danny Djeljosevic