Yahoo Movies The Wolfman
Oh, how easily humanity’s veneer of civilisation cracks to reveal the snarling brute within. As Jerry famously mumbled to giggling, hair-stroking Barbara in BBC TV’s The Good Life: “It’s the gesture ... brings out the beast in me.” Benicio del Toro, taking the lead in this new revival of the classic horror tale Wolfman, has the twitching nostrils and lips of some grunting demi-beast who somewhere on the darkened moor scents Felicity Kendal’s musk. In the second Twilight film, New Moon, moviegoers were explicitly introduced to the idea of dangerous physical intimacy with a werewolf, yet this new Wolfman keeps it relatively clean. Del Toro looks longingly at Emily Blunt’s exquisitely sculpted collarbone, a decent distance north of undisclosed cleavage. There’s even a kiss. But we have to wait for that chaste full moon before the hair-sprouting, finger-lengthening and cranio-facial distorting can all kick off.
Del Toro is the best, in fact the only possible candidate for the role of the Wolfman. Like many, I wondered if he would be playing the part without any makeup and effects. That rugged face is wolfy enough. Surely the pre-Wolf figure would be played by someone like Ben Affleck with a wimpy Harvard accent and dyed blond hair, segueing in the appropriate lunar phase to the rampagingly sexy Benicio? But no.
The new Wolfman is a souped-up version of the 1941 movie with Lon Chaney Jr and Claude Rains. Del Toro plays Lawrence, an acclaimed Shakespearean actor (we see him declaiming to a skull) who returns to his 19th-century family estate in ”Blackmoor, England” on being told that his brother has been clawed horribly to death by some awful monster. His father (Anthony Hopkins) has a sinister secret, and there are archetypes of exoticism and strangeness. Father has a Sikh manservant (Art Malik) and Gypsy encampments are to be found nearby, with a wise woman played by Geraldine Chaplin. While gallantly trying to slay the beast, Lawrence gets a grisly claw in the neck, planting the fatal lycanthropic spore. And all the time, he’s got the sweaty, hirsute hots for his late brother’s fiancee, Emily Blunt.
The movie, which appears to have been cut a bit, has a jerky, muddled narrative as it jolts from the remote moor to the digitally created Victorian London where hairy Del Toro mangles asylum doctors and menaces helmeted bobbies. But the all-important transformation scene is nowhere near as scary or impressive as the one in An American Werewolf in London from 1981, at least partly because the Wolfman itself is modelled on the flat-faced Lon Chaney original, so we don’t get the snout-protrusion effect that was such a powerful part of the John Landis classic. Del Toro looks about as dangerous as an urban fox snoozing in a compost bin and Blunt seems to be suffering from some residual Victorian queenliness. Looking in the mirror afterwards, I seemed pale from weariness.
