The Wolfman - Doubletake

"The Wolfman" is clearly a labor of love for the director (and, I'm guessing, the star - Benicio Del Toro - as he's listed as one of the producers). Monster movies, the classics from the 1930's and 1940's, are the kind of art-cinema classic that endear themselves to the minds of those who watched them as young children. In a lot of ways, Joe Johnston's "Wolfman" mirrors Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of "King Kong." But where Jackson was painting on a myriad of canvases -- 1930's Hollywood culture, the foreboding Pacific, Mysterious Islands that time forgot, and the spangley new world metropolis of New York City, Johnston's story has a lot less fun ground to cover. Which in essence sums up "The Wolfman" -- less fun, or at least not as fun as you want it to be.

The film opens on the gray/blue, brown/gray village of Blackmoor (a place we're stranded for most of the proceedings). Lawrence Talbot (Del Toro) is called home from a very long absence to help search for his missing brother, only by the time he gets there his brother's status has been upgraded from missing to dead (oh, what did we ever do without cell phones?). Upon tersely reuniting with his father (Anthony Hopkins) and consoling his brother's grieving fiancée (Emily Blunt), Lawrence sets out to avenge the death of his brother by finding and killing whomever or whatever rent him into an unrecognizable pile of meat.

The plot moves briskly through these beats. Save for one strange stroll down memory lane in which Lawrence recalls his mother's suicide, it's not long before we get to the gypsy camp (at which many of the townspeople's fingers are pointing and where Lawrence's brother was known to have been brokering deals) and we get our first full encounter (well, at least in swift-moving darkness) with the beast in question.

And what an encounter it is! While the movie faithfully (ploddingly, at times) reproduces the stuffy Victorian business of it's spiritual (and literal) namesake, the one place where the stakes go up is the gore factor. Dismembered limbs, heads torn from their shoulders, gaping wounds of ribbon-slashed faces, the movie pulls few punches in this department yet saves from lingering too long on any particular horror, so as to artfully supply the wall between gore and fetishism (the latter being the purview of more say the "Saw" franchise and the like).

The beginning of a running theme that all but the completely un-cynical would have already guessed before entering the theater begins here -- the movie tends to get markedly better when there's a wolfman on the prowl. I'm not giving too much away, given that the title character must be bitten in order to be infected ("lycanthropy" they whisper) that there are more than one wolfmen in the film, and each iteration is lovingly rendered in both the oft-highly scrutinized transformation sequences and in full form - hairy brutes that owe much, if not all, in terms of design to their 1940's inspirations. Gone are the hulking wolves of the "Underworld" or "Twilight" movies. These here are gen-u-ine wolf MEN. A great credit is due the effects team in particular, as each wolfman bears eerie resemblances to the actors from whom they transform.

Things don't go well for our hero, as you can imagine, and it isn't long before the action takes a welcome and dramatic shift to London. Everything is better in London, and here is where the movie shines brightest. The stakes are higher, the streets are clogged, and it's the one point in the film where we start to feel maybe we don’t know exactly how these dots are going to connect. The somewhat surprising revelations delivered by the not-so-surprising villain (there's a very early bit of foreshadowing that will likely tip you off, though some gender reversal is involved to make it work and don't read too hard into the allusion or it falls apart) isn't exactly what we expected, and adds a layer of convolution and confusion to what had been, up until this point, fairly staid and two dimensional characters. Genre films populated entirely by cardboard emotions can work, and while we all love to see more fleshed out reasoning and depth in our film's villains and protagonists the worst is when that transformation from 2D to 3D gets mangled along the way and we wind up with a lot of deformed, partially realized dramatization and emotional plot holes.

A combined failing of the actors and the director. The former problem is most particularly perpetrated by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who misses a lot of opportunities to sink his teeth in (no pun intended), instead eschewing towards the subtle. Understandable given the period of the piece (the lips of the British have never stiffer) but lamentable for the film as a whole. The latter failing from the director comes from a clear focus on style and the beast over a more coherent emotional message from the actors. At no point are we confused by certain revelations, but they fail in raising the stakes emotionally and as such only serve in wasting the filmgoers' time. Del Toro is notably restrained but still manages to occasionally smolder, the flip side of the extroverted types he tends to be known for. Emily Blunt is the best of the lot, putting a lot of fresh and real into a film that feels, in many ways, like it belongs in another time.