The Wolfman is as expected, a complete waste of time for all. There really is no reason for this misguided remake of the beloved 1941 Universal horror classic to exist. They couldn't even get the fu**king title right for a start! It should be The-Wolf-Man because that's how you say it... The... Wolf... Man, not The Wolfman. The spelling they have chosen is nowhere near as iconic or menacing as it should be. But anyway, I could have forgiven that rather small (but still significant) qualm if the movie had been half-way decent. Of course it wasn't - the movie is a disaster. The Wolfman, is empty, soulless and has had way too much money ($100 million!!!) thrown at it but none of it is accountable, and you can feel the panic that must have existed among Universal when they brought in editor Walter Murch to salvage the project to provide some damage limitation. His take seemingly was to cut the awkward transitional moments with excessive be-headings, blood gore and viscera, the frequent cheap jump scare at the audience (the laziest & lamest of all horror conceits was used a dozen times and it never once made anyone in the theatre jump). I really would be fascinated to see this movie played in a back-to-back double bill with Stephen Sommers' joyous $80 million re-imagning of The Mummy, because that special effects laden beauty must look like Cleopatra/Avatar compared to this. Seriously though, and I'm not kidding around... $100 million, and it all went on the talent and computers?!?! What a waste. I would love to see an audit report because the $100 million just isn't up there on the screen. I feel sorry for original director Mark Romanek whose vision has been compromised to such degree that barely anything is left from what he wanted this tale to be. I feel sorry for Rick Baker that his name is attached to this, the way they treated him was wrong, and dumb. He should be proud to know that his Wolfman in this movie works, the CGI one doesn't. I feel sorry for the always great Emily Blunt who does her best to forge out a character when there wasn't one written on paper. I feel sorry for Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaing, who acted way above the material and I feel damned depressed for Benicio Del Toro. How awful it must have been for him to see his dream role, his dream movie, which was pretty much only made in the first place because of his creative drive to get it off the ground- for it to crumble in front of his eyes the way it did. You can see it in his performance. He is tired eyed, bored, brooding, uninterested. No charisma, little effort - and that's not the Benicio we know. He didn't have a good time making this movie. The over-budgeted (for what is really a small story location wise) is special effects driven via the cheap gore schlock method and it brings nothing to the man turns wolf-beast legend. I hate to call director Joe Johnston (Hidalgo, Jurassic Park III) a hack because I've enjoyed a lot of his work in the past but this a patch-work movie that feels like it was made by one. Johnston doesn't know how to make a horror movie, and he is uncomfortable in the genre. He doesn't understand the Tobe Hooper school of tension (actually, Hooper's was relentless tension - SOO many notches above Johnson's work here), and he can't deliver horror fans the joy of fear, that we all crave when we see a movie like this. When Romanek bailed they should have brought in Juan Antonio Bayona - the guy who made The Orphanage, the tensest horror movie I saw last decade. He would have made a classic. There's no shocks, no scares, no jump-out-your seat moments, despite the desperate attempts to keep you from falling asleep because I tell ya, the audience was gone after the first few scenes on this one. There was a young couple sitting to the right of me, and the blonde girl clearly would have rather have been seeing Valentine's Day and she was getting angsty before the movie started, kinda curled up and closing her eyes saying "I'm not going to like this, the werewolf is gonna creep me out" but boy was she let off the hook here by the lack of anything to get terrified about. Johnston's take on tension is too show the audience as little as possible, flash cut shots of what is going on as blood splashes towards the screen which then climaxes in a be-heading or two. I swear, the movie competes with Sleepy Hollow on the be-heading count. It's not a horror movie like An American Werewolf In London, it's not a tragic romance story like the Lon Chaney Jr version, it's not a Hammer Horror story of wink-wink camp - it's tonally all over the place, and tries to be all of the above. The movie has no identity. I'm guessing the last minute editors (yes, there was multiples!!) have done their best to put something together that feels coherent but it's just so lacking of any kind of passion or fluidity Every scene is a dud, it all falls flat on it's face. It just wasn't working. No cinematic spark, it's just a big pulse killing dud. There is no other name for it.
The movie sure looks great. The late 19th century Victorian feel is captured by cinematographer Shelly Johnson and production designer Rick Heinrichs, and in a competition with Van Helsing, Sherlock Holmes, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Sweeney Todd and From Hell - it gets this time period of London just right and would win. The movie is beautiful in places if a little bleak but the smoky fog, the scenes shot by candles - at least bring a bit of atmosphere to the thing. But it's a dud and I've had a decade now of Universal monsters corrupted by directors who were all wrongly hired by the studio's. It's a toss-up for Universal of what they want to bring us next... We've got The Invisible Man I guess written and probably directed by David Goyer but you felt that always depended on the success of this movie - and then there's Jekyll and Hyde - with the awful casting of Keanu Reeves. Not since 1999 has anyone got a modern day re-imagining of a Universal classic right. It's about time somebody corrected this, because I'm sick of it.