Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
3/14/10
As
you can probably tell from any perusal of the coming release schedule,
the primary purpose of most studios these days is to exploit the name value
of the movies they produced in the past by creating new ones that play
off their legacies. This is particularly true in the horror genre,
where virtually every major title of the last 30 years has been the subject
of a recent remake (nope, not using the studios preferred term, “reimagining”.
They're remakes. Live with it). No studio is more closely associated
with a particular period in the history of the genre than Universal's 25-year
domination starting in the early 30's with Dracula and Frankenstein,
leading through the 50's sci-fi boom that produced The Creature from
the Black Lagoon, and they desperately want to get their own juice
from those vaulted rights. Their only real success was Stephen Sommers',
OK, reimagining of The Mummy as an Indiana Jones-style adventure,
but they've poured hundreds of millions into projects like the misbegotten
Van Helsing and now a hundred-fifty million dollar remake of The
Wolfman. Of course, that budget almost doubled during a lengthy
reshoot process in which conflicting visions of the kind of Amblin Entertainment
Theme Park ride director Joe Johnston does well and an R-rated bloodbath
did a battle that's not completely settled by his final cut. The
Wolfman sure does look like a hundred million bucks, and its talented
cast is all kinds of awesome in their roles. At its best, it absolutely
rocks, but like most times a movie that cost this much comes crawling out
of the vaults on Presidents Day, The Wolfman is less than the sum
of its erratic parts.
Sometime
in the late 1800's, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt) writes actor Lawrence Talbot
(Benicio Del Toro) a letter. It seems that his brother Ben, her fiance,
has gone missing, and she asks him to return to the ancestral Talbot
home to help with the search. He does, and has a chilly reunion with
his father, Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins) before learning that Ben
has turned up dead, mauled by some sort of animal. The superstitious
locals believe traveling gypsies are to blame, and Lawrence visits their
camp. There, a werewolf attacks, killing some and gravely wounding
Lawrence. Over the next few weeks, he slips in and out of consciousness,
but finally awakens miraculously healed. He speaks with Scotland
Yard Inspector Francis Aberline (Hugo Weaving), who refuses to believe
this talk of lycanthropy and accuses Lawrence of having something to do
with the killings. Lawrence sends Gwen back to London and continues
his investigation until the next full moon, when the reason for his miracle
recovery becomes clear. Lawrence is now a Wolfman, and he's not the
only one.
The
Wolfman is one of those rare movies (Wild Wild West comes to
mind as another) that seems to have been financed with a blank check.
Everything about its look seems to have received the utmost attention,
from Shelly Johnson's luminous cinematography and Milena Canonero's expensive-looking
costumes to famous actors playing long scenes inside Rick Baker's delightful
werewolf makeup. Whoever had the ingenious idea of mixing the howling
voices of David Lee Roth and Gene Simmons to create the sound of the Wolfman
deserves a lot of credit, it may be one of the greatest sound effects in
history. And the resulting film is a joy to look at, with Johnston
and his actors striking a stylized tone that perfectly compliments the
19th Century Gothic world those craftsmen have created.
The
performances are wonderful, starting with Hopkins, who hasn't done this
sort of blockbuster in a while and luxuriates over every word that comes
out of sinister Sir John's mouth. I don't want to give too much away,
but his is the role to have here, and he gives it everything he's got,
creating one of his most entertaining performances ever. Del Toro
makes a conscious and effective decision to ape the quiet hopelessness
of Lon Chaney Jr.'s original Wolfman performance. He's not
an actor we usually think of for his subtlety, but here he has a great
deal of success underplaying. Weaving shows off what a sensational
action hero he could make for the right movie, doggedly pursuing his quarry
with that same officious resolve that made his Agent Smith one of the all-time
movie villains, dusted with just the right amount of righteousness and
concern. Blunt does good things with a thankless role, constantly
insisting that Lawrence do the opposite of what he should, even when she's
trying to save him. But we can see the sincerity in Gwen, and that
goes a long way toward making her a person who mades bad decisions for
good reasons rather than a walking plot stretcher.
And
the plot does need stretching. Even with two different visions of
the story at war, there's really only an hour or so worth of incident within
The Wolfman's 100 minutes and it gets off to an excessively leisurely
start while Lawrence slowly comes to a series of realizations that are
written on our ticket. But once the movie finally gets down to its
wolfie business at about the halfway point, it's jam-packed with nifty
incident, including a creepy visit to a mental institution where Lawrence
is to be “cured of his delusion” of lycanthropy, a large-scale rampage
through the streets of London (did they really have double-decker horse-drawn
steam-powered carriages like that?) and a spectacular Wolfman v. Wolfman
climax that blows out whatever is left of that sky-high budget. When
it's on its game, The Wolfman really is something.
Pity
writers Kevin Andrew Walker and David Self can't quite pin down exactly
what that something is, with the large-scale action sequences belonging
firmly to a PG-13 80's brand of roller-coaster summer movie horror and
the Wolfman attacks and mental hospital coming from a more serious, gory
and disturbing brand of horror that almost never touches a budget this
big. Both work against each other in context, and the movie works
far better on a scene-to-scene basis than it does as a whole. I know
there was much reshooting and the release was pushed back by over a year,
so I can only imagine which Wolfman came first and which was stepping
on its tail.
Still,
fans of monster movies should have a great time with The Wolfman,
which takes the skeleton of the Lon Cheney Jr. classic and infuses it with
the spirit(s) of modern big-budget Hollywood. It's nowhere near the
movie it could have been had it picked a vision and stuck to it, and I
doubt Universal will be writing Joe Johnston a blank check to head for
the Black Lagoon anytime soon. But there's a lot here that you really
should see, and that's not a claim most horror remakes can make. |
