There’s no two ways about it; 2010’s The Wolfman is a terrible movie.
I’ve now seen it twice, willingly both times.
It isn’t that the film has no merits. Given the hell of preproduction, it’s easy to see how this could have been a tribute to the classic horror films, evoking them while doing something new. Even now, it is beautifully shot and art directed, almost sumptuously so; Hugo Weaving is fun, Anthony Hopkins underplays so much he’s almost deadpan, and Emily Blunt actresses her way gamely through the movie. Even Benicio del Toro, bizarre casting choice as he is, gives the tortured victim protagonist as sturdy a foundation as he can manage.
And a lot of the film, like Danny Elfman’s score, is serviceable, if not remarkable in any way. Much of The Wolfman is fine. The special effects are not mind-blowing, but get the job done, and the humorous gore is especially nicely handled.
The story, however, is a hot mess. (More of that in a moment.) What redeems the whole is that the good elements are good enough to keep the film from being painful, but not so good they feel wasted. Instead, we’re left with a worse than average werewolf movie that is perhaps an exemplary case of “fun-bad.” Best watched with a friend or two, and maybe some alcohol, it’s the sort of movie where the ridiculousness mounts in such a way that you can’t help but laugh.
There’s a place for movies like this. It can be incredibly freeing to watch a movie you know will be bad. There’s no pressure to engage with it. You lose nothing if you’re distracted by the pizza arriving, or you and your friend get involved in a digression about Emily Blunt’s film career or other werewolf movies. And since you were never expecting it to be good, it’s hard to be disappointed.
I’m not arguing that filmmakers should set out, intentionally, to make bad films. (The results of that are mixed at best.) I’m simply drawing a distinction between those that “fall with style” and those that just lie there, a broken heap.
The Wolfman starts out a little silly, but well enough. Pretty much everything after the protagonist’s first transformation, though, ceases to make much sense. Around the last act, the movie gives up on any sort of narrative through-line; characters appear places for no good reason, new characters are introduced to be killed almost instantly (goodbye, handsome nameless deputy), Hopkins’ character has no motivation except “BE EVIL,” and Emily Blunt’s character just loses any sense of direction at all.
That said, there are some spectacular and entertaining deaths, there’s a lot of fire, and after a slow middle, the film ends at a pretty good clip. It’s at its best when it skips the romance and the soul-searching, and leans on the very horror clichés that, once upon a time, it meant to do homage. When it’s melodramatic and larger-than-life, the movie manages to compliment, if not match, its artistic backdrop. With a sturdier script, and probably a different lead (though del Toro does his best), this could have been a solid B Movie effort.
Instead, largely because of plot and dialogue, it’s fairly terrible. But it fails with style, and if horror/fantasy happens to be the genre that your tolerance is for, it manages to be a lot of fun.
Grade: C+ How pretty a movie it is pushes it a bit higher than it might have been, enjoyment aside; Hugo Weaving is also worthwhile, and should do more in this mode.
The Exploding Macguffin 