The Wolfman Review

Come on Chewie! Get us out of this!

It's times like these that I consider discontinuing my 3 to see section that I publish at the beginning of each month, because twice now I have turned out severely wrong on what films should be good to see this month. This time misfortune rears it's ugly head in the form of The Wolfman, directed by the man who brought us such classics as Honey, I Shunk The Kids. You should probably know by now that the film is about a man who is bitten by a werewolf, and every full moon turns into the wolfman. That should be the perfect formula for an awesome action horror film, but it just isn't. The fact of the matter is that he only turns into the wolfman once a month, and then we have to sit through an entire month before we see the wolfman again.

I wouldn't be too annoyed with it if they:

1) Had actually interesting plot and character development in between the full moons, and

2) The Wolfman sequences were better and lasted more than 4 minutes.

They regrettably mostly fail in both those areas. The intermission time between wolfman sequences mostly includes the idiotic characters twidling their thumbs waiting for something to happen, and once the full moon rises, when we think we're about to be rewarded for the long time spent on exposition, they dissapoint us.

The problem with the film is that it is too faithful to the original The Wolf Man, down to the point where they practically copy the look of the monster from the 1941 film. The director tried to make the creature realistic by making it almost completely a makeup job done on the actor, therefore the monster looks like a black Chewbacca. A black Chewbacca who rips people to peices, but for some reason doesn't eat them. Another thing that ticked me off about it is that they were willing to go full costume makeup for the wolfman, but when it comes to real animals like a deer or a bear, they decide to use visual effects. They couldn't find a trained bear for those 8 seconds of screentime?

The acting in the film was a unanimous failure with the exception of Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaving. Hopkins is incapable of delivering an awful performance, and he's able to add something to his already deep, disturbing role. Hugo Weaving delivers the greatest performance of this film. He's supposed to be somebody you hate, but by the end he's the only one you remotely care about which makes the final frame of the film so haunting. I'd say they should do a sequel focusing on his character, but seeing as the film will most likely fail in comparison to the Taylor/Taylor scene from Valentines Day, I don't think that film will ever come, nor should it. My grade for The Wolfman is D+.