Ben saw: The Wolfman

The trailer made it look like a stinkbomb. Will this long-pushed back remake be a pleasant surprise?



......no. Not a pleasant surprise at all. What I expected was funny bad and I got more or less what I expected. I've watched a lot of bad movies and when I see a strikingly bad one there's always a temptation to look agape at the screen and mutter the words of so many movie nerds: 'Worst....movie....ever.' That's obviously hyperbole. In practice, a lot of really bad movies are workman-like in their badness; tone deaf exercises in trying to massage uninspired or incoherent footage in to passable hotel and airline fodder and a cut-your-losses theatrical flop as opposed to an outright bomb. This describes The Wolfman to a T. It is not a coincidence that this ostensibly scary monster movie was not even given the dignity of a Halloween release and was instead quietly disposed of in the Hollywood dumping ground that is February.

That being said, I had a really good time with this movie because, as an exercise in mocking the crap on the screen with a friend (and enraging the people around us), it provides rich and varied sources of material.


So what's there to mock? The script is a good place to start. The dialogue is a steady stream of cliches and cold readings of fortune cookies said back and forth from actor to actor, often with little or no concern for whether or not a given line actually deals with thoughts raised in prior lines.The plotting is a shambling mess of arbitrary decisions, grimly determined to drag us from one set-piece to another for more hot man-wolf action...but not in the bestiality sense. Benicio del Toro comes home because his brother is dead (via werewolf as we learn from the intro scene), gets bitten while investigating said death, becomes a werewolf and must spend the rest of the movie dealing the consequences of his uncontrollable new bloodlust. Hugo Weaving's investigator......investigates this curious whodunnit (and the subsequent 'whatdunnit' when about 50 people get killed in a few rampages later in the movie). Anthony Hopkins is his eccentric jerk of a dad. Emily Blunt wears a lot of ruffle collars in the process of serving as a walking plot device. Characterizations are vague at best: why does Weaving believe that silver bullets will do anything? Why does Hopkins allow his gigantic house to fall to pieces (and why does his perfectly nice-seeming servant stay with him)? Why does Blunt fall for del Toro? Why does anyone like Blunt (when her character could scarcely have less personality). Why does everyone always know where the other characters are going to be? And on it goes. The plot is predictable in its broad strokes (you will know whom the real villain is within 15 minutes if you've not recently had a lobotomy) and yet manages to make unexpected and ineffective decisions whenever possible to trip itself up.

In light of such a poor script, the actors had their hands tied but the whole exercise seems like a forced march for del Toro, Blunt and Weaving. Hopkins isn't much good either, but he comes from that delightful school of UK actors that will try their damnedest, even in utterly crap projects (see: Christopher Lee). In bad movies I usually expect the leads to stink but the supporting cast will at least gamely try; in this case the main four actors really aren't that bad (well...del Toro's pretty bad) but supporting cast is laughable, consisting mainly of the kinds of crap performances and broad stereotypes that I'd expect from those historical villages we'd sometimes go to on elementary school trips.



The effects look cheap and are at their best, ironically, when used to make del Toro look younger. As my friend pointed out, the surface of the moon has more even texture than del Toro's real skin so the amount of make-up and digital post-production dedicated to make him look not decrepit must have been substantial. My friend and I disagreed on the cinematography, but I found it hokey and broad, if well-framed. Where the hell was the light coming from in most of those scenes?

The move compares well to the opening ceremony of the Olympics that I watched the same night: not scary, designed by committee and filled with inexplicable and thoughtless artistic decisions. It's a barely functional movie and, outside of outright mockery, there's no reason to see it. Woof.

Grade: D-