The Wolfman (2010)
The Wolfman (2010) – (editorial note: I watched and reviewed this movie on 14 February 2010… I don’t know why but I seem to have overlooked it when copy/pasting all my old Facebook minireviews to this site.) Someone has their heart ripped out in this movie so I guess it was kind of appropriate viewing for Valentine’s Day, huh? [wow, that joke was a bit emo] Anyway this is one of those sort of bipolar movies containing awesomeness and awfulness. In the end the two reach a sort of equilibrium of “meh.” Several scenes are truncated at less than a minute which gives the film a real awkward pacing. Rick Baker’s make-up is great and I wish the practical effects transformation sequence he’d designed had been used and just augmented with CG instead of the total-CG transformation the movie uses, but as is the transformation scenes ain’t bad. Fun fact, Hugo Weaving’s character Francis Aberline is based on Frederick Aberline, the real-life investigator of the Jack the Ripper case. I like Weaving in the movie. Dude was born to rock those mutton chops. So there’s a nifty atmosphere and Anthony Hopkins does his low-key bugfuck crazy thing which you’ll either dig or detest and in some angles Benecio del Toro does actually look a bit like Lon Chaney, Jr. It all adds up to a movie that doesn’t quite know what tone it’s looking to strike. Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is a good example of what this movie was trying to be. Joe Johnston’s The Wolf Man entertains but is haunted by the spectre of the movie that could have been.
