The Wolfman

The Wolfman was AWESOME.

No, really, it totally was. It struck all of the right notes, from the dry-ice fog on the ground to the overwrought Gothic castle (complete with dry leaves crumbled on the floor!) and the tension-building violin music in the background. The story itself had some problems, but watching it was a joy. Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving are a triangle of fabulous acting and you can tell they were having fun: each of them owns their character, delivering a perfectly balanced triad of hunter, hunted, and orchestrator. Hopkins is perhaps the standout, portraying a loving, if distant, father figure with such subtlety you don't notice until its too late that he's been hiding dangerous insanity. Weaving and Del Toro have somewhat less complex characters to play, but they still deliver with a ferocity and believability that is engaging to watch.

Emily Blunt is completely wasted in her role as Gwen, the fiancee of dead brother Ben and later love interest of Del Toro's Lawrence, which is a criticism of the role rather than the actor. She is given hardly anything to do but simper, although she, also, takes hold of her role and acts the hell out of it. It is a testament to her skills as an actor that she is interesting to watch onscreen, even when all she is doing is running away.

There are moments of real fright in the film, moments that make your skin crawl and moments that make you jump out of your chair. The score plays a big part in this - in any other instance, I would have said it was over dramatic. Here, though, EVERYTHING is so over dramatic that it loops back around to believable. The movie picks an aesthetic and sticks to it like nothing else, and it is SO over the top that you can't help but get drawn in. Right down to the end credits, which are played over various medical sketches and diagrams attempting to illustrate some of the "science" behind lycanthropy, the film owns its vision, and it is a vision I love.

What I loved most about The Wolfman is that it, somewhat like Underworld, takes pop culture back to the roots of lycanthropy: unromanticized and violent, deformed and doomed. These are not Stephanie Meyer's "werewolves," they are not Anne Rice's, they are not the self-aware shapeshifters that run freely with the wolf pack and can change at will. They are MONSTERS. There is nothing romantic about Benicio Del Toro's plight, and Gwen KNOWS that - as she frantically searches for a way to save him, she comes to the same realization that the audience does. For Lawrence, and for anyone cursed like this, there is only one solution, and there's no getting around that. Not a happy ending, but a necessary one, and I personally don't think it could have ended any other way.