Given the recent crop of vampire movies incandescing at the box office, the success of Paranormal Activity and the permanent ubiquity of zombie apocalypse films, it was only a matter of time before Universal Studios decided to resurrect their renowned monster line-up.
The Wolfman, directed by Joe Johnston (best known for Jurassic Park III and The Rocketeer) follows a travelling theatre actor named Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro) as he is summoned home after the death of his brother Ben at the hands of a mysterious beast potentially linked to a gypsy curse.
As the body count rises – and you can look forward to the sight of a good number of bodies and their contents – Lawrence, his father, Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins), the manservant, Singh (Art Malik), and Ben’s widow, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), are joined by Francis Aberline (Hugo Weaving), an inspector on the trail of the supernatural killer.
|
The Wolfman Directed by Joe Johnston. |
The Wolfman’s biggest success is its chilling atmosphere, part Fall of the House of Usher and part Hound of the Baskervilles, which makes a brooding, unsettling backdrop of a simple pastoral community and a decaying family estate.
Johnston also achieves a rare balance with flashbacks, filling in back-story while setting up organic narrative progression without ever feeling gimmicky or stale. Not only that, he ends the film perfectly, neither cauterizing the story with neat little bow nor begging for a sequel by leaving things wide open and unsatisfying.
Unfortunately, while the actors here are as capable as could be (del Toro, Hopkins, Weaving, and even Blunt are all scene-stealers in their own right), the characters themselves are simply too shallow, their motivations and their destinies for the most part woefully evident.
But it is difficult to critique The Wolfman in the usual sense of assigning blame for its shortcomings given the film’s troubled production history. Original director Mark Romanek quit the project over creative differences, necessitating rewrites to satisfy Johnston when he signed on. More than 15 minutes of footage (and, one would think, a certain amount of character development) was excised to propel
Not only that, the score by veteran composer Danny Elfman was discarded in favour of an electronic replacement with a more contemporary feel, intended to bring The Wolfman closer in tone to the successful Underworld franchise.
But the new score was too anachronistic juxtaposed against the film’s 19th-century setting, so – with Elfman busy working on Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland – Universal brought in a new orchestrator to fine-tune Elfman’s original score to match what had been re-cut for the alternate soundtrack.
The final product can hardly be counted among Elfman’s most memorable works (this is the man who scored Edward Scissorhands and Big Fish, who wrote the ubiquitous themes to Batman and TV’s The Simpsons), but it is unreservedly a strong effort in the right direction.
In this sense, some of the most notable and interesting tidbits about The Wolfman are actually things that most audiences will never even be aware of. But one sign of a good movie is that no hint of what might have gone awry during production manifests itself on the screen, and despite the film’s unevenness in some respects, that is the case here.
Overall, Johnston’s The Wolfman is not the bravura reinvention it might have been, but with a faultless cast and oodles of atmosphere it sets the stage for the forthcoming re-imaginings of other classic Universal properties, including Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.