Remakes are not your friend. Regardless, they are an inevitable fact of entertainment these days. I won’t go as far as to say that it’s possible to do them right, but there are circumstances that make them easier to accept. For the 2010 version of The Wolfman you know the idea is to update a 69-year-old film with new effects. If that were all it takes to create a great remake, the Oscar ballots would need rewriting.
Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) is a supposed successful stage actor residing in London during the 1880s. When news reaches him that his brother is missing, he hastens to his family’s estate in Blackmoor to join the search. Once there, his father John (Anthony Hopkins) informs him that his brother’s body has been found and it appears that a large unknown animal is the culprit. After questioning some locals, Lawrence comes face-to-face with the beast and in a hairy encounter (I couldn’t help it) he is maimed.
To Lawrence’s surprise his survival has begot him the curse of lycanthropy; a full moon will cause him to transform into a werewolf. While eluding detective Abberline (Hugo Weaving), Lawrence must rely on his brother’s former fiancée, Gwen (Emily Blunt), as he tries to understand the curse.
This isn’t the same Wolfman whom you may recall squaring off with Frankenstein’s monster. Every attack is amped up with a dose of amputation and decapitation. The Wolfman wastes no time in disposing of countless innocent bodies. The fashion that which it is seen sounds more gruesome in theory, that’s because Danny Elfman’s excessively loud score dwarfs the film’s visuals, making it almost comedic. Elfman’s idea of scary-sounding-music is no longer in vogue.
Director Joe Johnston has a history with CGI animal-centric productions having helmed Jumanji and Jurassic Park III. His whole repertoire is in effects, and this film doesn’t disappoint when it comes to CGI and creature design. The Wolfman is his first project to receive the R rating. Aside from the messy attacks, the look and tone of the film are by contrast friendlier to a general audience. Johnston simply doesn’t have the tricks in place to make an unsettling horror film. Not only is the atmosphere to blame, but also the pacing is all over the place. It appears that nothing happens unless there’s a full moon. Any time between them is marginalized. What this means is that characters are always dealing with the burden of beast mode, and never feeling human. All we get from Lawrence is that he’s an actor who has a family. It would have been far more realistic for his theatre company to make an attempt to contact him, for him to have debts, deadlines, friends, etc.
It’s so hard to look into a film that’s this shallow. All of the characters exist only within the context of the narrative. They never feel fully realized because we never get a glimmer into their typical day. Maybe Benicio is an actor, but I need more than a second of Lawrence on stage to give him the same credit, and even if I do I can see that his occupation plays no factor on the plot. In other regards you get what you expect and with a story this simple there’s little room to truly drop the ball. What you get out of this take on The Wolfman are a few people you don’t care about being slashed to pieces with little buildup for suspense. The Wolfman bites. **
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