Genre: Horror, Drama
Director: Joe Johnston
Starring: Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving
Running Time: 105 minutes (plus trailers)
"Terrible things Lawrence. You've done terrible things."
Based on the film of the same name from 1941, Joe Johnston’s remake of The Wolfman tells the tale of a young man who returns home to his father’s estate in rural England in 1891 following the brutal death of his brother at the hands of an unidentified beast. After a run in of his own with the monster that leaves him sporting a nasty bite wound, the young man begins to go through a series of ghastly transformations whenever there is a full moon, unable to control his own bloodlust. A staple of classic horror in the 40s, seventy years later the story of The Wolfman is as hackneyed and predictable as they come. The drawn out plot and uninspired production in this film sparked no fear or even interest in me as I counted the minutes, lay down in my seat and even went so far to do the unthinkable: check my text message, as I waited for the movie to end.
I’m just going to come right out and say it: since I began this blog a little over a year ago, The Wolfman is one of the worst movies I have ever had to review. I look back at films I’ve given extremely low ratings to, films like I’ve Loved You So Long or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – two movies (although they could not possibly be more different) that I felt a deep personal loathing for; the former a smug and pretentious foreign wank, the latter an offensive and bloated piece of trash. I hated those films, but despite the fact that I think The Wolfman might be worse than either of them, I didn’t hate it. No, The Wolfman is instead a film I pity. Say whatever you want about Transformers (and believe me I have), at least one could argue that it succeeded its own pathetic terms. The Wolfman doesn’t succeed on any terms.
Starting from the top: the movies looks terrible. It’s got that really obvious sheen of a hack film, a slight blur to it, the camera constantly just out of focus. It’s as if someone has smeared Vaseline over the lense in an attempt to make it appear more like a period film, succeeding only in making even the actual physical sets look like poor rendered CGI; of course they don’t look nearly as bad as the actual CGI. It breaks my heart to see directors generating their animals (and I don’t mean the actual Wolfman, I mean a bear or a deer) on a computer because it’s cheaper or easier than dealing with the real thing. As for the werewolves themselves, I think if we have learnt anything from not one but two Hulk movies, it is that depicting a man morphing into a beast of some kind, muscles shifting and bones creaking, looks not so much scary as it does utterly ridiculous.
The movie is also very bloody, which would never normally register as a complaint for me. But the problem here is that while the violence is quite graphic, it’s not treated with any weight. We see heads getting torn off, throats getting ripped out, intestines being slung across furniture like gory Christmas decorations, and all of it played, or so it seemed to me, for laughs. Which isn’t a bad thing in theory (I can see the humour in decapitation like anyone else), but this simply isn’t a funny film. I’d have loved it if this had turned in a B-movie; who wouldn’t want to see a cheesy, campy werewolf movie with bucket loads of blood and gore? But with the movie aiming at the realm of serious cinema, the over the top violence comes across as unsuitably glib, out of place and pretty unpleasant.
The acting is universally poor, although perhaps the material they were working with is more to blame than the performers themselves. All jokes about appropriate casting aside, the very hairy Benecio del Toro elicits absolutely no sympathy as the films lead, whilst Emily Blunt as his deceased brother’s fiancé and (you guessed it) love interest is similarly vacant. Worst of all though, and I hate to say it, is Anthony Hopkins, who delivers every single woeful line of dialogue with exact same intonation and exact same bored expression on his face. The semi-saving grace in terms of the acting was Hugo Weaving as the detective determined to hunt the Wolfman down. Not that his performance is particularly strong, but I guess after seeing him as Elrond and Agent Smith, there’s something pleasantly familiar about watching him in the role of a pompous jerk.
What else is there? Oh yes, the script! And how could I forget it, seeing as I recognized it from probably fifty other films. Honestly, The Wolfman is nothing but a series of woeful exchanges strung together to resemble a tired and clichéd plot that had me yawning five minutes into the film. In my recent review of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air I questioned what is more important in a script: the overall story structure, or the dialogue in each individual scenes. Well as it turns out, both are pretty fucking important. This films story is utterly derivative of every werewolf story you’ve ever heard and can be called from start to finish. On top of that, even the most casual film goer will be able to predict lines before they leave a characters mouth; if a son is returning after a long absence he would be the what son?
I should mention that were a couple of brief moments of perhaps unintentional but never the less entertaining campiness in between the agonizingly slow dramatic scenes; a conceptually creative (although horribly realized) dream sequence and a laughably over the top fear mongering sermon amongst them. Safe to say though, the only part of this movie that I actually enjoyed was the final fight between del Toro and Hopkins’s characters, both of them in full blown furry mode. As they begin to transform, papa wolf rips off what remains of his shirt with both hands, and let’s face it, when someone does that, you know it’s on. What followed was truly it one of the most poorly conceived, staged, choreographed, directed and edited fight scenes I have ever seen; so poor in fact that as one wolf clung to the wall and then flipped his opponent over a grand piano, I couldn’t help but giggle.
But for the most part, The Wolfman can’t even succeed as an unintentional comedy because it’s just too boring. This movie literally fails in every possible way a movie can fail; poor direction, terrible acting, atrocious dialogue, laughable special effects. It is not scary, it is not tense, it is not exciting and it is not fun. It is one of the dullest, most clichéd films I have seen, possibly ever, and while I don’t feel enough contempt for it to give it a zero out of ten (I’d probably rather watch this over Transformers or Dragonball Evolution just on principle), I still cannot stress enough how awful it truly is.
The Wolfman is in cinemas now
Director: Joe Johnston
Starring: Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving
Running Time: 105 minutes (plus trailers)
"Terrible things Lawrence. You've done terrible things."
Based on the film of the same name from 1941, Joe Johnston’s remake of The Wolfman tells the tale of a young man who returns home to his father’s estate in rural England in 1891 following the brutal death of his brother at the hands of an unidentified beast. After a run in of his own with the monster that leaves him sporting a nasty bite wound, the young man begins to go through a series of ghastly transformations whenever there is a full moon, unable to control his own bloodlust. A staple of classic horror in the 40s, seventy years later the story of The Wolfman is as hackneyed and predictable as they come. The drawn out plot and uninspired production in this film sparked no fear or even interest in me as I counted the minutes, lay down in my seat and even went so far to do the unthinkable: check my text message, as I waited for the movie to end.I’m just going to come right out and say it: since I began this blog a little over a year ago, The Wolfman is one of the worst movies I have ever had to review. I look back at films I’ve given extremely low ratings to, films like I’ve Loved You So Long or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – two movies (although they could not possibly be more different) that I felt a deep personal loathing for; the former a smug and pretentious foreign wank, the latter an offensive and bloated piece of trash. I hated those films, but despite the fact that I think The Wolfman might be worse than either of them, I didn’t hate it. No, The Wolfman is instead a film I pity. Say whatever you want about Transformers (and believe me I have), at least one could argue that it succeeded its own pathetic terms. The Wolfman doesn’t succeed on any terms.
Starting from the top: the movies looks terrible. It’s got that really obvious sheen of a hack film, a slight blur to it, the camera constantly just out of focus. It’s as if someone has smeared Vaseline over the lense in an attempt to make it appear more like a period film, succeeding only in making even the actual physical sets look like poor rendered CGI; of course they don’t look nearly as bad as the actual CGI. It breaks my heart to see directors generating their animals (and I don’t mean the actual Wolfman, I mean a bear or a deer) on a computer because it’s cheaper or easier than dealing with the real thing. As for the werewolves themselves, I think if we have learnt anything from not one but two Hulk movies, it is that depicting a man morphing into a beast of some kind, muscles shifting and bones creaking, looks not so much scary as it does utterly ridiculous.The movie is also very bloody, which would never normally register as a complaint for me. But the problem here is that while the violence is quite graphic, it’s not treated with any weight. We see heads getting torn off, throats getting ripped out, intestines being slung across furniture like gory Christmas decorations, and all of it played, or so it seemed to me, for laughs. Which isn’t a bad thing in theory (I can see the humour in decapitation like anyone else), but this simply isn’t a funny film. I’d have loved it if this had turned in a B-movie; who wouldn’t want to see a cheesy, campy werewolf movie with bucket loads of blood and gore? But with the movie aiming at the realm of serious cinema, the over the top violence comes across as unsuitably glib, out of place and pretty unpleasant.
The acting is universally poor, although perhaps the material they were working with is more to blame than the performers themselves. All jokes about appropriate casting aside, the very hairy Benecio del Toro elicits absolutely no sympathy as the films lead, whilst Emily Blunt as his deceased brother’s fiancé and (you guessed it) love interest is similarly vacant. Worst of all though, and I hate to say it, is Anthony Hopkins, who delivers every single woeful line of dialogue with exact same intonation and exact same bored expression on his face. The semi-saving grace in terms of the acting was Hugo Weaving as the detective determined to hunt the Wolfman down. Not that his performance is particularly strong, but I guess after seeing him as Elrond and Agent Smith, there’s something pleasantly familiar about watching him in the role of a pompous jerk.What else is there? Oh yes, the script! And how could I forget it, seeing as I recognized it from probably fifty other films. Honestly, The Wolfman is nothing but a series of woeful exchanges strung together to resemble a tired and clichéd plot that had me yawning five minutes into the film. In my recent review of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air I questioned what is more important in a script: the overall story structure, or the dialogue in each individual scenes. Well as it turns out, both are pretty fucking important. This films story is utterly derivative of every werewolf story you’ve ever heard and can be called from start to finish. On top of that, even the most casual film goer will be able to predict lines before they leave a characters mouth; if a son is returning after a long absence he would be the what son?
I should mention that were a couple of brief moments of perhaps unintentional but never the less entertaining campiness in between the agonizingly slow dramatic scenes; a conceptually creative (although horribly realized) dream sequence and a laughably over the top fear mongering sermon amongst them. Safe to say though, the only part of this movie that I actually enjoyed was the final fight between del Toro and Hopkins’s characters, both of them in full blown furry mode. As they begin to transform, papa wolf rips off what remains of his shirt with both hands, and let’s face it, when someone does that, you know it’s on. What followed was truly it one of the most poorly conceived, staged, choreographed, directed and edited fight scenes I have ever seen; so poor in fact that as one wolf clung to the wall and then flipped his opponent over a grand piano, I couldn’t help but giggle.But for the most part, The Wolfman can’t even succeed as an unintentional comedy because it’s just too boring. This movie literally fails in every possible way a movie can fail; poor direction, terrible acting, atrocious dialogue, laughable special effects. It is not scary, it is not tense, it is not exciting and it is not fun. It is one of the dullest, most clichéd films I have seen, possibly ever, and while I don’t feel enough contempt for it to give it a zero out of ten (I’d probably rather watch this over Transformers or Dragonball Evolution just on principle), I still cannot stress enough how awful it truly is.
The Wolfman is in cinemas now
