The Wolfman, Joe Johnston's gallingly leaden remake of the 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. classic, both lives and dies by its transformations. Its most obvious selling point is also its most successful: Johnston nails the depictions of a humble man's gruesome morph into a flesh-hungry monster. And yet the film itself is felled by a rending confusion about whether it is at heart a genteel narrative thriller in the gothic mold or a single-player limb-ripper that, with a few programming tweaks, could easily find a spot at the Xbox Olympics.
Not that it plays either of those parts very well. Despite a high-toned look the script is almost impossibly dense with C-movie sinkers. Writers Andrew David Walker and Kevin Self don't seem capable of ending a scene without a thunk, or opening one without a stony cliché. "Lo and behold, the prodigal son returns," is the actual greeting Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins) offers his son Lawrence (Benicio Del Toro) when arrives at the family's North England estate after being summoned by his brother's fiancée Gwen (Emily Blunt) to help locate her missing betrothed.
We know its something of a fool's errand, having watched the poor chap get torn to shreds by a shadowy beast even before the title credits roll. And so within the first few minutes viewers are asked to synthesize graphic rampaging (and similarly punishing sound design and score), über-gloomy art direction, and Hopkins's campy interpretation of his poetry-reciting, moon-gazing madman into a coherent tone. Where a film like Sleepy Hollow, despite its flaws, gave a cinematic burnish to an old folk tale with vision and a precise dose of self-awareness, The Wolfman fails to persuade even itself of its intentions. As a result the film is most convincing as an opportunistic crack as the revived vampire/teen wolf market.
The story, such as it is, seems as bored and impatient with its own machinations as we will soon be: bloody massacres, pretty lady, sins of the father, yadda, yadda, yadda. The revelations about Lawrence's past -- as a boy he came upon his mother's body soon after her suicide; his grieving father sent him to an asylum -- add little depth to Del Toro's listless mien, a performance at deadly odds with Hopkins's swanning. When Lawrence is bitten by the beast after one of its rampages through Blackmoor, we wait for some metaphor behind the choice (he is the only one to survive the attack) to emerge. Aside from some loose jawing about the gypsy curse on the Talbot family, a few religious allusions, a swipe at the shapeshifting acting profession (Lawrence treads the boards in London), and ominous advice from Sir John about freeing the beast within, no compelling angle on the subtext of the werewolf -- the original avatar -- is offered. Though there is some satisfying vengeance in the bloodbath the ensues when Lawrence is captured and returned to the insane asylum where he was tortured as a youth, the burden -- despite a strenuous bout of exposition when father visits son in his cell -- seems utterly random.
Even Lawrence's fondness for Gwen is given no believable beastly truck, for despite lingering p.o.v. shots of her clavicle and wobbly lips, fondness is exactly what it amounts to. There may be more sexual frisson between Lawrence and the hot-eyed Scotland Yard detective (Hugo Weaving) sent to wrangle him. The only thing at stake in the ultimate showdown, where two werewolves meet in mid-air, wuxia-style, is your composure. While the transformation sequences capture some of the visceral horror of a body wracked from within, the werewolves themselves are a symptom of a film divided against itself: effects artist Rick Baker has given the beasts a retro feel -- think Chewbacca after a hard day on the shire -- that looks merely silly when submitted to the brutal paces of modern, CGI-enhanced combat. Tortured by vague demons and surrounded by incompetents, Lawrence's fate evokes an unintended empathy: by the third or fourth mawkish howl sent rippling across the moor, I felt that fur bag's pain.