Horror virtuoso Leigh Whannell, screenwriter of the original Saw and writer-director of The Invisible Man, gets into an awful mess with this fundamentally muddled and unsatisfying attempt at reviving the Wolf Man from Universal Studios’ monster stable as part of a possible integrated franchise series – the first since Benicio Del Toro found the cheek whiskers and lupine dodgy teeth sprouting at the first touch of moonlight back in 2010. There’s an excellent opening prologue sequence and a very smart final shot – but everything between is silly, misjudged and dull with dud storytelling, middling prosthetics and wide-eyed “I’m scared” reaction acting that will have you checking the time on your phone.
Christopher Abbott plays Blake, a failed writer and successful dad and househusband, living in New York with adorable daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) and workaholic journalist-breadwinner Charlotte (Julia Garner). Blake is haunted by childhood memories of being brought up in remote Oregon by his angry and emotionally cold single father (Sam Jaeger). (The film sports half-heartedly with wolfmanness being a metaphor for toxic masculinity and abusive fatherhood.) A flashback reveals how the pair were hunting in the woods one day and menaced by a creature that Blake’s dad gruffly assures his son was a bear. When grownup Blake inherits his dad’s creepy old Andrew Wyeth farmstead, he suggests to Charlotte that they all go on a family trip out there together as a bonding experience. Hugely bad idea.
At the outset, the script squanders the fear potential of a local guy they meet in the woods, played by Benedict Hardie, who claims to remember Blake as a boy. Surely his character is going to develop interestingly and unsettlingly? No. We are simply plunged into a scary world with all the reality of a video game, in which there is a wolf man out there, but also the possibility of being infected, zombie-ishly, through a bite or scratch – this would create another wolf man, and therefore a self-cancelling wolf-man-versus-wolf-man situation, but with neither wolf man being compellingly evil or fascinatingly good.
The transformation scenes are passable – including time-honoured fingernail- detachment moments – but far inferior to comparable scenes devised long ago by John Landis or David Cronenberg. Those estimable performers Garner and Abbott look exposed by a film project that simply feels rushed and undeveloped.
Source: theguardian.com
