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.
Persistence of Vision 