The latest attempt to reboot a classic Universal Studios monster results in something so boring that it’ll fracture jaws from yawning too hard.
Wolf Man is supposed to be a wolfman/werewolf movie, but it’s more of a solemn-dad-loses-his-hair-and-a-couple-of-teeth-while-suffering-from-melancholy movie. It tries to put a new twist on the wolf man, but instead just sucks all of the fun out of it. I think this was supposed to be allegorical regarding failed fatherhood and marriages, but instead, it’s a lame ode to aging and going bald.
Werewolf movies are all about the transformation, and this features a transformation that slowly happens over a large swath of the movie’s running time. The movie is 103 minutes long, but feels more like 162 hours of sermonizing in the worst, gloomiest church ever.
Blake (Christopher Abbott), the aforementioned sad dad, has just been notified that his father has died, and he is on the way to clean out his dad’s house in the Oregon wilderness; his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), are along for the ride. An accident occurs in the woods, and Blake is scratched by an unseen beast.
Almost immediately, he starts throwing up and losing teeth while trying to eat beef jerky. (Hey, we can all relate to the jerky thing.) He notices his hair is falling out, and at one point, he tries to eat his own arm. (OK, I can’t really relate to the arm-eating thing.) He eventually becomes … something, but I was not quite sure what that something is supposed to be. A hairless werewolf sort of thing? Just a super-ugly guy? Homeless meth-head with a taste for his own arm?
Yes, I can accept that this is not an old-fashioned werewolf movie, and that it is looking to be a new spin on the sub-genre—but if it’s going to be different, it had better be compelling, and Blake’s seemingly endless transformation is just not engaging. He’s eventually sharp-toothed and howling, but last I checked, most wolves have all of their hair. He winds up looking more like Jeff Goldblum’s Brundle Fly from The Fly in the early stages of transformation—but a more boring, less visually interesting version of that.
The script lays it on thick and slams you over the head with the overriding message that dads sometimes really suck. This is basically The Shining, minus the snow, the hotel, Jack Nicholson, any sense of style and nuance, Stanley Kubrick, alcoholism undertones, the powers of Stephen King, and any sense of fun.
Director Leigh Whannell is essentially returning to the well here after the massive success of The Invisible Man, his other unorthodox Universal monster reboot. That movie leaned heavily on allegory and drama, but it had, of course, an unseen monster. This one relies heavily on monsters, but those monsters are filmed in the dark without any true sense of character.
The film’s written opening says those afflicted have some sort of legendary curse called “face of the wolf.” In other words, they aren’t standard-issue werewolves; they can be killed with shovels, normal bullets, knives, bites to the throat and a series of well-placed, hard-hitting insults about their lame appearance that hit home and drive them to suicide. (That last one doesn’t happen in the movie, but I would imagine it’s true.)
Abbott fails to shine in the central role. His Blake is unlikable and dull, and never rises above that, even when he’s running around howling. Garner, normally reliable, is saddled with a role that requires her to simply put on a quizzical face and stand in the corner.
Watch closely, and you’ll see a few homages to films like An American Werewolf in London. Sorry, but a movie this bad doesn’t deserve to pay homage to anything far superior. Instead, it should just stay on the shelf and not bother anybody.
