The Wolfman ( 2010 )

Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, & David Stern

Directed By Joe Johnston

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780653/


There ought to be mystery, heat, torment, doom, longing, rue, and, yes, blood in a film about a werewolf, but “The Wolfman” has almost none of these -- or at least not enough of any of them to impart them to an audience.

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.  But very little of it compels, frightens, absorbs or convinces.  Werewolves have perennially taken something of a back seat to vampires, ghosts, aliens, and, recently, zombies in the imaginations of horror filmmakers and fans, and this dreary effort will do nothing to change that.

Benicio Del Toro, so wrong for the material that he seems almost desperate to express his discomfort with his body and eyes, plays Lawrence Talbot, an English stage actor raised in America and returned to his ancestral mansion to help find his brother, who has gone missing.  Upon arrival, he learns from his estranged father (Anthony Hopkins) that his poor bro is dead, apparently at the claws of something very savage.

Lawrence determines to find out what happened, as does his brother’s grieving fiancé (Emily Blunt).  He encounters gypsies, gets chewed on by a wild beast, and is presently assumed by one and sundry to be cursed as a werewolf himself -- an assumption which proves true on the next full moon.  Enter Scotland Yard in the presence of a sarcastic inspector (Hugo Weaving) and everyone makes off to London and a series of increasingly implausible action sequences and plot turns.

Hopkins and Weaving seem to be fully aware that they’re involved in hokum, and they milk several key moments each with agreeable impunity.  Blunt, though, could be almost anyone, truly -- which says less about what she does with her role than about how paltry a part it is.  And Del Toro can only make his character come alive by revealing the depths of his eyes; the regret you feel him express when he does so surely has as much to do with his thoughts about making the film as with his character’s plight.

Obviously director Joe Johnston (“The Rocketeer,” “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “Jumanji”) is responsible for a lot of what’s wrong.  Time and again his efforts to invigorate the material or probe into it are vulgar, lifeless, trite, and, especially when computer-generated, laughably fraudulent.

But, then, screenwriters David Self and Andrew Kevin Walker managed to improve not one whit on Curt Siodmak’s 1941 original script, not to mention those of such films as “The Company of Wolves,” “Wolfen,” “An American Werewolf in London,” “Wolf,” and “Brotherhood of the Wolf” all of which found sparks of energy and interest in lycanthropy.

Still, while Johnston may not be guilty of ruining a gem, he does nothing to polish the materials he’s been given, either.  Like Del Toro -- and, too, like viewers of this mishmash -- he’s likely doomed to feel a shudder whenever he spies a full moon in the sky from now on.

Overall Rating ( * * )

Mr. What?