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Ahhh, the wolfman. He’s known as Wolfie to his friends and neighbours; Mr Wolfman to everyone else. Is he a wolf? Is he a man? Should we really care? I admit that I went to see The Wolfman with unrealistically high expectations – expectations which would soon be dashed on Mr Wolfman’s claws. After all, I reasoned, it has a fine cast, a classic (if slightly tired) story, and the ironically named Emily Blunt. Plus the trailer did look genuinely frightening. What, I thought, could go wrong? Quite a bit, as it turns out.
The plot – which deviates from the 1941 original – is a familiar Victorian yarn of aristocratic family curses, monochromatic English moors and slack-jawed peasants waving fiery torches. Lawrence Talbot (played by the spectacularly miscast Benicio Del Toro) is a famous Shakespearean actor who has been recalled to his ancestral home in Blackmoor. His brother went for a walk alone one night on a misty moor (something which those with merely a passing acquaintance with horror films would avoid assiduously) and was found a week later in a ditch, body ripped to shreds. Who, or what, could have done such a thing? His widow (Blunt) is too distraught to offer any plausible suggestions, and Lawrence’s father (Anthony Hopkins, displaying a penchant for tiger-print scarves) seems oddly calm about the whole affair. Meanwhile, the local townsfolk – a gaggle of superstitious yokels – remain convinced that "it were the gypsies what done it".
After riding out to confront said gypsies against his father’s spooky advice about staying inside when the full moon is out, Lawrence is set upon and bitten by what looks like Chewbacca on steroids. After being quickly nursed back to health by Blunt (a little too quickly…), he is paid a visit by an interfering detective (Hugo Weaving, displaying a handle-bar moustache and sideburns which can only be described as magnificent) who is determined to get to the bottom of all this grizzly murder business. After his first transformation into the Wolfman (which, to be honest, we all saw coming) Lawrence wakes up on the estate, caked in blood and filth, and is promptly carted off to the Victorian loony bin. Thus begins his quest to escape, find a cure for his lycanthropy, and take down the original werewolf.
The Wolfman’s main problem is not so much the story itself, but rather the sense that we’ve seen it all before. We know from the outset how things will play out, and most of the film is entirely predictable. Oh sure, there is a slight twist which reveals unsettling details of Lawrence’s family history, but minus that the plot is simply a re-hash of several generations' worth of low-budget horror flicks. One’s cinematic subconscious keeps expecting Christopher Lee to appear any moment as some industrial manufacturer of silver bullets. The ending is grossly unsatisfying, and most of the plot threads are half-heartedly conceived, to say the least. There is the reveal of Lawrence’s father’s infatuation with Blunt, which disappears as a plot element just as quickly as it emerged from nowhere. But the film’s worst crime is the most common complaint made against the genre: the characters know they’re in a horror film. “We don’t have any silver bullets, do we?” asks Weaving’s detective, fully conscious of how weary the line sounds before it passes his lips.
The production is also messy – the werewolves look like the illegitimate love-children of Captain Caveman and a raccoon, and seeing the silhouette of what is meant to be a ferocious killing machine limping around like a gorilla with a bad leg is more funny than frightening. Del Toro mumbles his lines as he always does, and Hopkins channels enough of Hannibal Lecter to make his performance adequate, but it’s obvious he’s only here to pay for his kitchen extension. The standout performance however is Blunt, who shows just the correct amount of tenderness and vulnerability to make you give a damn about her character’s fate. The Wolfman is by no means the worst film ever made (that honour will probably go to the inevitable sequel, Wolfman 2: The Wolf Hits Las Vegas) but it is mediocre in the extreme.
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