Recent Release Reviewed: The Wolfman

The Wolfman
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving
Screenplay: Andrew Kevin Walker, David Self
Director: Joe Johnston

"Terrible things, Lawrence...You've done terrible things."

The troubled and turbulent production history of The Wolfman remake has received a lot of press. From the replacement of original director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo), to rewrites and reshoots, perhaps the most striking part of all of this is how committed Benicio Del Toro has stayed to the film. One of the producers on the film, he has stuck with it throughout and remained enthusiastic about the endeavour. Despite all of the negative word of mouth the film got prior to its release, I was really hoping that, at the least, The Wolfman would be fun.

Renowned stage actor Lawrence Talbot (Del Toro) gets word that his brother Ben has gone missing. He returns home after a long absence to the family home only to be told by his eccentric recluse father John (Hopkins) that Ben's body has been found, horribly mutilated. Lawrence promises his Ben's fiancée, Gwen Conliffe (Blunt) to find what killed his brother and heads for the local gypsy camp. Gypsy Maleva (Geraldine Chaplin) tells him his brother was cursed. The camp is attacked, and Lawrence is bitten while protecting a gypsy boy. He recovers much faster than expected, arousing the suspicion of Detective Frederick Abberline (Weaving), and begins to have strange dreams...

This review is going to echo what a lot of other reviews have said. The Wolfman is very patchy. The influence of different creative forces are clearly visible, and they rarely mesh well. There's subdued drama, courtesy of Lawrence and Gwen's tentative romance, hammy villainy, thanks to Hopkins entertainingly sinister performance, gory creature feature, and Gothic horror. The parts are entertaining but the whole is a bit of a mess. Quiet courtship and father-son tensions sit uneasily beside spilled intestines and an overwrought but entertaining sequence in a London madhouse.

The force keeping all these disparate parts together is Del Toro's performance as Lawrence Talbot. Resisiting the temptation to go over the top, his careful, low-key performance serves as an excellent base for the film to work from. Blunt also does good work in an almost thankless role as Gwen, when she is given more to do than quiet and concerned. Hopkins, as the trailer made clear, is channeling Malcolm McDowell for the mad-as-a-chicken-with-lips patriarch, which actually leads to one of his better performances in recent years. He handles the cheesier dialogue with a wicked grin, and only really goes over the top towards the end. Weaving gets the balance right as Abberline, doing stoic and sceptical without sacrificing the sense of fun. Geraldine Chaplin gets a nice little part as Maleva, while Anthony Sher goes over the top as the asylum head whose arrogance gives us a clear idea of his fate.

Johnston does surprisngly good work with the visual aspects of the film. Blackmoor is a foggy, threatening place that recalls the original film, while the London scenes are filled with pleasantly street-lit murky streets. The Talbot family home is magnificently grand and Gothic, but we see too little of the inside. What we do see is well-designed. It's filled with cobwebs and stuffed animal heads, remnants of Sir John's travels. The brief glimpses of the asylum also benefit from the production team's eye for detail. The action sequences are exciting enough, and though the gorier scenes are a little jarring, they are well-handled.

Where things really go wrong is during the transition from the second act to the third act. It's been reported that the DVD will feature an extra 20 minutes, and they are a twenty minutes that the narrative, at least, could really benefit from. Things are far too rushed during the build-up to the finale, which is also a disappointment. The transformations are decent but not spectacular, a shame given the involvement of effects maestro Rick Baker. The wolfman himself is faithful to the original, which is fun for fans but perhaps not very impressive for those who are less familiar with it.

But I would like to applaud the filmmakers for their good intentions. Certainly, The Wolfman is far from perfect, but the decision to remain surprisingly faithful to the original film, setting the narrative in the late 19th Century, the wolfman make-up, are all signs that the idea is solid. When The Wolfman works, it's wonderfully entertaining, and parts of the film are exactly what I want from this sort of film. Sadly, the filmmakers are unable to keep the momentum going.

So, what to make of it? Entertaining, yes, but also disappointing. The parts are good, the whole does not work as well as it should. It has good performances and solid action sequences, not to mention a wonderful atmosphere. It's also very uneven and suffers from a weak ending.

6/10