"The Wolfman" Should've Stayed A Classic
I didn't mind The Wolfman, I'm just wondering if Hollywood is just wanting to take the old movies, slap them on to some film with the new great graphics and top-end actors, while trying not to mess up the actual story. Either that or Hollywood is really just running out of new and clever ideas to put on film, even though there is a ton of screenwriters writing good movies that get shot down on a daily basis. Maybe it's just me, but I really wish that someone could shut down the M. Night Shyamalan/Hollywood nimrods of the world.
In The Wolfman you got some serious front-running actors. The main character is Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro), an actor of the stage for those times. You first get introduced to him doing Shakespeare's play Hamlet. After his show he gets a knock on the door from the character Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), Lawrence's sister-in-law, who tells him that his brother is missing. Lawrence, being stubborn, says he doesn't want to go home. The explanation comes late in the story, but it's mainly because of his mother who supposedly killed herself when he was younger.
Despite Lawrence's stubbornness he decides to go back to look for his brother, only to find he had been killed. His father Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins) says his brother was found dead in a ditch, and that he has arrived just in time for the funeral. A weird feeling arises when the father and son meet up again, due to the fact that the father went a little off the mark after his wife's death. He wound up sending his older son to the mental hospital, screwing up Lawrence life.
Lawrence goes about trying to figure out who or what actually killed his brother, along with the other people who were getting slaughtered by what people think was a beast. Lawrence visits a gypsy to talk to her about the medal that he found on his brother's body. The politicians and police believe the dancing bear of the gypsies was the one who mutilated the people, only to be mistaken when the group of people are attacked by the actual werewolf. (Of course the movie tries to keep it mysterious by not giving a full-on of what the wolfman looks like.) Suddenly Lawrence gets attacked by the werewolf after trying to save one of the gypsy boys that ran away in the forest.
Somehow Lawrence survives, but it leaves this strange scar on his neck. As the movie goes on we are introduced to the investigator of the mind-blowing tales of that era: Inspector Abberline. This is funny because of the fact that this is the same character from the movie From Hell, with Johnny Depp playing the inspector trying to solve the Jack the Ripper murders. Now the funny thing I have to say is that didn't work with The Wolfman, as the Inspector Abberline in From Hell had died of an opium overdose; yet the Abberline who is in The Wolfman is alive and well. The actor they picked to portray Abberline is one of the best actors they could've chosen, in my opinion: Hugo Weaving.
Although I'm not an expert on the whole story behind Abberline, it seems that someone didn't do their homework in regards to crossing over the two movies. With that said the movies do seem to draw on each other a bit. I don't really want to go any further, as I might give away the little twist they have done with the movie. However The Wolfman was certainly interesting on how it portrayed the beast's story. Despite this I beg and plead to Hollywood to stop taking classic movies and turn them into these high-end movies that won't create the revenue that was needed to make the movie in the first place.
So if you didn't go and see The Wolfman in theaters, you definitely saved some good money. I say rent it on DVD or On-Demand, but if you can wait just a little longer it will be played on the movie channels in a couple months...constantly.
I give it a Benicio Del Toro frozen bathwater dip out of 5 stars, um, I mean 3.5 out of 5. (I had to give the star rating system for this because there are those damn people that like to jump in fridged water for fun. What's that club's name again? Oh yeah, The Polar Bear Club!)
The Wolfman
Company: Universal Pictures
Length: 103 - 119 minutes (depending on the different cuts)
Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller, Action, Sci-fi
Released: 2010
*** ½ (out of five)
