The Blacksheep Online | Movie Review: The Wolfman

Movie Review: The Wolfman

March 2, 2010 - 1:00 pm | Posted by: Dave

Director: Joe Johnston

Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt

Synopsis: When it comes to Werewolf movies, this one is better than Teen Wolf 2, but not as good as Teen Wolf 1.

Grade: C+

For Valentine's Day Weekend I decided to take the girlfriend to the most romantic movie playing. It was a story of love, lust, and shirtless Puerto Ricans. And the best part was that Ashton Kutcher didn't appear in a single frame!

Yes, I saw The Wolfman this weekend, and while I'm sure I enjoyed it much more than I would have liked the star-packed, Hallmark advertisement that is Valentine's Day, I can't say it was good. There wasn't anything about it that showed me why the movie needed to be made. First of all, it's not even Halloween so my love for monsters is at a low (although I'm sure I'll be hearing "The Monster Mash" all over the radio pretty soon honoring the holiday it's about: President's Day). But mainly the film didn't do anything different to the legend of werewolves. Besides adding super-cool CGI wolf transformations, I probably would have felt the same watching the original Wolfman or that cool movie with Jack Nicholson as a werewolf (I think it's called The Bucket List).

Benicio Del Toro stars as the namesake character which is pretty fitting. If there was ever a fictional animal that I'd liken Del Toro to, it would definitely be a werewolf (although Unicorn is a close second). He goes back to England because his brother dies from a wolf attack and sure enough he gets turned into one. Anthony Hopkins plays his father with a dark secret (can you guess what it is?), and Emily Blunt plays the obligatory love interest that the werewolf wants to be with but is afraid of hurting. The rest of the plot is easy to figure out if you've ever seen any sort of werewolf story in pop culture: The werewolf eats people, Del Toro wakes up scared, townspeople get mad, and Anthony Hopkins does awesome shit.

If the filmmakers were trying to start a new monster craze with Wolfman, like Twilight did with vampires, they failed. I mean, there were zero scenes about the werewolf in high school! And he definitely didn't get emotional enough like all those vampires who the world just doesn't understand. And where was the classic top-of-a-van dancing scene that is embedded into werewolf mythology?!

But seriously, it's been proven that monster movies can still be good while maintaining their levels of badass action and fighting. Just look at recent zombie movies like 28 Days Later or I Am Legend (those things were kind of zombies, right). But Wolfman just seems concerned about showing us all the cool things that special effects can do. It's good that director Joe Johnston can at least handle the CGI stuff probably because has a lot of experience with that from working on films like Jurassic Park III.

My biggest problem with Wolfman, and something that I tend to point out in a lot of films, is that it's such a waste of talent. The three main characters make such great movies that it just seems weird that they would all be in something this mediocre. It's not like any of them are bad in this film, it's just that they all have little to work with. But then I remember that I could've seen Valentine's Day this weekend and feel better knowing that I only watched 3 stars being wasted and not 600.