The Wolfman

So now we know what Joe Johnston's "The Wolfman" was doing for a year before being dumped into the oblivion of a February release: trying to reshoot and shape-change its way toward sexy beasthood. The desperate metamorphosis didn't take. This sorry attempt to update a couple of horror classics, "Werewolf of London" (1935) and "The Wolf Man" (1941), fails as storytelling, supernatural mythology, scary movie, F/X blowout, actors' showcase. In short, this dog's dead on arrival.

Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro), renowned Shakespearean actor, returns after long absence to a dreary family manse CGI'd onto the edge of gloomy Blackmoor, at the request of his murdered brother's fiancée (Emily Blunt). Dad (Anthony Hopkins) greets him as though it were only yesterday, describing his older son's horrific demise as matter-of-factly as he would one of his big-game hunts.

Decked out in full-length animal-skin robe with tiger-pelt lapels, Talbot Senior stalks around his messy mansion full of Victorian furniture, animal trophies and dead leaves. ("The Wolfman" is not a PETA-friendly flick: The death of beasties is celebrated everywhere, even in topiary, and apparently no fashionable Victorian would be seen in anything but fur.)

Soon, broody Lawrence is plagued by childhood memories of his beautiful mom lying all bloody in his father's arms, an apparent suicide. His outlook worsens after an ill-conceived visit to the local gypsy camp, during which he's chomped by something that goes whip-pan-flash in the night. Scares in "The Wolfman" come courtesy of this tiresome, overused technique, when, that is, Johnston's not falling back on the "let's creep through this dark hall, what's that creaking sound behind the door, must be a monster, oh, it's just the family dog" leap-out-in-your-face effect. Just like the doctor's rubber hammer to the knee, and equally exciting.

Everybody lusts for Blunt in "The Wolfman": dad, both sons, the audience. We yearn for her to stay on-screen, to gift us with the illusion that acting matters, that putting on the skin of another being can be exciting and beautiful and real. Also welcome is Hugo Weaving's Inspector Aberline. Hammy, yes, but what a bracing alternative to the stuffed-shirt performances of Del Toro and Hopkins. (Weaving seems to be trying out the speaking style of Alan Rickman, who also occasionally gets off on high-class ham: thoroughly wetting a word down in his mouth, savoring it in the back of his throat, then playing it out slowly as though loath to let it leave him.)

It's a mystery to me what's afflicting Del Toro, a man whose very name suggests bestial powers, in this movie. Our first glimpse of his face startles, so much does he resemble Lon Chaney Jr., the heavy-featured star of the original "Wolf Man." But Chaney plays his doomed Talbot as a baffled bear of a man, caught between involuntary savagery and an ultra-rational father backed by the law and psychiatry. There's true tragic resonance in the way Chaney's gentle, overgrown American boy comes home to death by his father's silver-wolf-handled cane.

But from the start Del Toro seems drugged, strangely torpid. And as the film dips deeper into melodrama, this actor who's often been brilliant shows not the slightest sign of engagement or passion, despite the blandishments of lovely Blunt. Turning into a hairy beast, getting dunked in ice-water baths at a lunatic asylum, crossing swords with domineering dad -- nothing seems to really disturb Del Toro's torpor.

Sadly, Hopkins offers little relief. His character draws perhaps even more from the scientist in "Werewolf of London" than the father in "The Wolf Man," though the two are linked by the tension between too-rational man and his "lower" instincts. The "London" scientist gets bitten by a wolflike creature while searching in Tibet for a flower that cures lycanthropy. Back home, the lab rat, no party animal, seethes with jealousy when his beautiful wife goes out clubbing with an old admirer. Soon his inner beast is rampant, the other extreme of scientific rationalism. In the new "Wolfman," Hopkins' world traveler shares a Tibetan encounter and a taste for beautiful women, though most of this explanatory history comes as late, lengthy exposition rather than anything we see or believe. Truth is, our Hannibal just doesn't have much to do, and he does very little with what he has. Forget fava beans; Hopkins' high-class scenery-chewing stinks.

In lycanthropic tales of terror, the man-in-wolf's-clothing reminds us of an imagined evolutionary past, wild days unfettered by moral or rational reins, so that we enjoy a glorious, unbound physicality. Men and women who run with the wolves -- now those are real party animals! And that's exactly the kind of hot energy that's missing in this stolid, painfully uninspired variation on the theme.

The relentlessly gloomy "Wolfman" fails to evolve. Never leaping up or falling into terrible abysses, the story and its hapless players simply plod blindly onward (to Danny Elfman's musical alarums) and sink, too slowly, to the bottom. Even Rick Baker's man-to-wolf transformations don't measure up to those in "An American Werewolf in London" nearly three decades ago.

Johnston ("Jurassic Park III," "Jumanji") and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker ("Se7en," "Sleepy Hollow") shoot for contempo relevance by splicing together a couple or three unintegrated narrative ideas, each skin-deep and bloodless. Throw in an always-good-for-a-laugh Oedipal triangle, the tug-of-war between man's animal instincts and psychiatry's need to nail down the id and, oh yeah, that old wrestling match between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, played out over and over by Wolfmen and Cat People and Hulks and Wolverines.

At a climactic moment that should have torn us apart with pity and terror, Blunt, all undone, sobs, "I'm sorry ... I'm sorry." We should get that in writing from the people who made "The Wolfman."

Also:

At the 'Wolfman' Premiere

Some of the Werewolf's Best Movies

Werewolves of (Victorian) London

Kathleen Murphy currently reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.