Throughout the month of March, Jeff will be posting about one horror movie that he’s seen recently each day. Odds are he won’t keep to this grueling schedule, but it’s nice to have the illusion of structure. It’s like a theme week times four. It’s 31 Days of Terror.
Joe Johnston is a maddening director. He’s been responsible for some good films (The Rocketeer, October Sky, and the underrated race-movie/Western hybrid Hidalgo) and some, well, Johnston directed Jurassic Park III and the shockingly franchisable Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. His most famous film, for good or ill, is Jumanji, which manages to be silly and campy enough for its little kid audience while maintaining the same sense of adventure that he manages to weave through the three movies above that I actually liked. It’s that very thing that makes me optimistic for 2012′s Captain America movie.
The Wolfman is not a rousing adventure, however. If anything, it reminds me of Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Both films are lavish period-piece remakes that are straight homages to their source material rather than reinterpretations. In that regard, it’s a success as a film, and it’s entertaining, although the movie kind of holds the viewer at arms’ length. The performances mostly match the mood, and this is Benicio Del Toro’s least mumbly performance since Dr. Gonzo. It flirts with the notion of approaching lycanthropy as a disease to be treated, which seems to be the popcult zeitgeist for interpreting our monsters at the moment, but it’s little more than a flirtation and only used in juxtaposition to underline the inevitability of The Curse as a supernatural affliction. The asylum sequence should have had more depth to it; the audience knows that the symptoms of Lawrence Talbot’s heightened senses come with tinges of madness, including surreal hallucinations. The montage of his incarceration, though, only shows him raving about his father while being tortured. This is one place where the film’s homage nature hurts the narrative, since some real medical treatment and some therapy might have made the story a bit stronger.
If I have a gripe with The Wolfman, it’s that Anthony Hopkins just kind of meanders through his own movie, oblivious to the one everyone else is appearing in. With his flamboyant clothes, his Indian manservant, his crazy eyes and his eccentricities, he jars with practically everything around him. I suppose that there’s a point to that, but the sense of attractive menace that I feel like we were supposed to have gotten from Lord Talbot was really a sense of unintended hilarity instead.
So, The Wolfman is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a solid homage that is a bit less effective because of its throwback nature and a case of rampant scenery-chewing from someone who should really know better.
