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The Wolfman Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for bloody horror violence and gore) Genre: Horror Theater release: February 12, 2010 by Universal Directed by: Joe Johnston Runtime: 2 hours 5 minutes Cast: Benicio Del Toro (Lawrence Talbot/The Wolfman), Anthony Hopkins (Sir John Talbot), Emily Blunt (Gwen Conliffe), Hugo Weaving (Francis Abberline) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

The werewolf gets no respect.

Everyone knows Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's monster, even if they haven't seen the movies, but hardly anyone really knows Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man. Vampires are everywhere nowadays, often in risible incarnations, but we can still take them seriously, while werewolves seem inherently semi-comic. Howling at the moon inspires smiles rather than chills.

Ever since An American Werewolf in London, werewolves have been essentially postmodern monsters, with no hint of the Victorian aura of gothic romance and tragedy that still clings to Dracula and Frankenstein's monster. (Let us not speak of Van Helsing.) Perhaps because of Dracula's and Frankenstein's actual Victorian literary cred, they each got ambitious if flawed period remakes in the early 1990s by, respectively, Francis Ford Coppola and Kenneth Branagh. Around the same time, Mike Nichols made Wolf, a modern-day werewolf story starring Jack Nicholson.

Now, more than fifteen years later, Joe Johnston and Benicio Del Toro want to redress that imbalance. Playing it basically straight, The Wolfman harks back to the werewolf's 19th-century roots, if not in Victorian horror literature, at least in the gothic Universal horror tradition it inspired. Here is a werewolf movie that still considers it worth mentioning that even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night can become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.

Benicio Del Toro as Lawrence Talbot …

The Wolfman considers it worth mentioning; it does not know why. There is much talk of curses and damnation and fate, of God defending his faithful and forsaking the damned to the power of Satan. There are Gypsies who talk about the saints and a Sikh manservant who calls himself a warrior of God. Yet it's far from clear that there are any actual ideas behind this fraught language, let alone a worldview behind the ideas.

The Wolfman retells the classic werewolf story, but has little to add besides volume and gore. Jump moments pile up to the point that you stop jumping and merely feel annoyed at the obvious, heavy-handed manipulation. Alone in the dark in his ancestral home, Lawrence Talbot seems to hear a creepy whisper, but it turns out he's just remembering something from his youth. Then a minute later it happens again. Later on there's a gotcha dream, with a menacing figure rising from the shadows and leaping at Lawrence in his bed—but then he wakes up. Or so it seems, but then it happens again—but it's a dream again. It's like a haunted house where they never stop jumping out and saying "Boo!"

Lawrence is played by Del Toro, a gifted actor and, apparently, a werewolf buff and collector whose desire to pay homage to The Wolf Man is sincere. Unfortunately, Del Toro is part of the problem. For one thing, while I'm not yet sure that Del Toro couldn't be persuasive in a period piece, I'm now pretty sure he can't play a 19th-century scion of Scottish gentry.

Anthony Hopkins as Sir John Talbot

For another, Lawrence is supposed to be an acclaimed Shakespearean actor, a man of the London stage whose turns as Macbeth and Hamlet are admired by Scotland Yard investigator Francis Abberline (Hugo Weaving). Nothing in Del Toro's performance hints at that kind of accomplishment, that sense of a life far from the Scottish moor. Instead, Lawrence is a sad sack who never seems like anything but a man walking to his doom. It detracts from the impact of his character's fate that he seems to know and accept that he is a character in a horror movie.

Anthony Hopkins plays Lawrence's estranged father Sir John Talbot like a man who is past caring what others think of him, and can barely be bothered to muster the appearances of social convention. It's possible that this was a thoughtful acting choice, but to me it was indistinguishable from phoning it in. A Scottish burr creeps into Hopkins' line readings sometimes, but by no means always.

There are makings of a thoughtful reinterpretation of the werewolf story. The creature's origins are closer to home for Lawrence, and the oft-maligned Gypsies are no longer the carriers of the curse, which could instead be seen as an oblique legacy of British imperialism. Giving Lawrence a brother who is an early casualty, and making the romantic interest, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), the former fiancée of Lawrence's brother, are both good ideas. A tragic back story involving Lawrence's ill-fated mother is a potentially intriguing twist.

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