The Wolfman (2010)

[5]

Benicio Del Toro plays the cursed title character in this remake of Universal Pictures’ famous 1941 monster movie. After his brother is discovered mutilated, Del Toro returns home to his father’s estate to find out who killed him. Anthony Hopkins brings gravitas as the father, and Emily Blunt pours her heart out in the role of the dead brother’s fiancée. In searching for the culprit, Del Toro is bitten by the beast and doomed to its moon-driven rages. Blunt researches to find a way to break the curse while Hugo Weaving leads the charge to capture and kill the beast.

The Wolfman features a great cast and some impressive, atmospheric sets and locations. The script is largely faithful to the original movie, with the addition of some welcome inter-family drama between Del Toro and Hopkins. Rick Baker’s makeup is solid, and the use of computer-generated imagery fits relatively well into the movie’s period aesthetic. Horror fans will be pleased to know there’s also a lot more gore and violence than was allowed in 1941.

Where the movie suffers is its rhythm and pacing. One director (One Hour Photo‘s Mark Romanek) saw the movie up to production and then left over budget & scheduling issues. Joe Johnston (Captain America, The Rocketeer) then stepped in, oversaw rewrites and completed the film. Six months of re-shoots were later needed, and two veteran directors (Walter Murch and Mark Goldblatt) were called in to try and salvage a movie out of everything that was shot. The result is a movie that never feels comfortable in its own skin. It lacks dramatic peaks and valleys, instead flitting from scene to scene like an overgrown montage or a feature-length trailer. Time isn’t spent to mine dramatic moments, build suspense, or bask in any grace notes. And gothic horror is not a genre where you want to skimp on any of these vital components.

Maybe the world didn’t need a faithful remake of an old-fashioned horror movie. But we’ll never really know, since the effort was warped into something else in post-production. In the end, this Wolfman is watchable and certainly has its moments. But given its pedigree and status in genre movie history, it’s still a bit of a missed opportunity. With Geraldine Chaplin and Max von Sydow.

Academy Award: Best Makeup Effects (Rick Baker, Dave Elsey)