Universal’s ‘Wolf Man’ struggles with cheap scares and predictable storytelling.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Welcome to January at the movies, or as someone once said, the winter of our (cinematic) discontent. Universal’s “Wolf Man” is yet another one of its attempts to reboot its Golden Age of Horror classics (or just shun original content like every other major studio). Let’s disregard the fact that the results have run the gamut from the wildly overrated “The Invisible Man” (2020), which pales, if not disappears compared to the 1933 James Whale original, to the just plain bad Tom Cruise vehicle “The Mummy” (2017), and the ludicrous“Dracula Untold” (2014). Universal tried to resurrect this beast before with the depressingly bad 2014 “The Wolfman” with Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, and Emily Blunt no less and a risible, father-son, rock ’em sock ’em, battling werewolf finale.
Now, we have “Wolf Man,” a film directed and co-written (with his actor wife, Corbett Tuck, making her debut) by Leigh Whannell of the 2020 “Invisible Man.” The result is a dull mix of horror and soap opera, beginning with scenes establishing the myth of a “man with a wolf face” in 1995 in the heavily forested mountains of Oregon, where a brutish Vietnam veteran and single father named Lovell (Sam Jaeger) bullies his young son Blake (Zac Chandler), in an attempt to toughen him up. Together, they encounter a growling creature in the woods and climb into a deer blind to seek shelter. Thirty years later, Blake (Christopher Abbott, “Kraven the Hunter”) and his cherubic daughter Ginger (Brit Matilda Firth), who is dressed as some sort of elven princess, walk together in San Francisco. The lame dialogue establishes how much Blake loves his daughter.
Blake is a writer, although he is now a full-time, oddly eunuch-like dad. His wife Charlotte (poor Julia Garner) is a successful journalist, which is all we ever know about her. Blake receives notice that his long-missing father, with whom he has had no contact, has been declared dead, and he and his clan must go to Oregon to close up his father’s farm. What could go wrong?
Much of “Wolf Man,” shot in Ireland and New Zealand, seems designed to keep costs down. The cast amounts to about half a dozen people. Compared to other werewolf films, including John Landis’ “An American Werewolf in London” and Joe Dante’s “The Howling,” both 1981 classics, the make-up and other effects are disappointing and minimalist. In one of the film’s many cliches, Blake, driving a truck through the deep woods, comes across “something” in the middle of a dark road and veers into the trees, where he, his family, and a hapless Oregon neighbor named Derek (Benedict Hardie in an almost nothing role) encounter the wolfish man. Hmm, who could this be? We wonder. The main locations, including the old farmhouse and barn, are remote. The sound design and music mercilessly pound us to a pulp to compensate for the cheap-looking production.
The film is a noisy, jump-cut-filled, therapy-honed nothing about fathers and sons, fathers and daughters and husbands and wives, mostly variations on the theme of “Daddy is the Big Bad Wolf.” Blake is clawed by the creature and begins to change into an even more boring version of himself, losing teeth, nails, and hair, a la David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” (1986). Even the relatively crude “lap dissolve” transformation of Lon Chaney Jr. by Universal’s great make-up artist Jack Pierce in the 1941 original “The Wolf Man” would have been preferable to the unimpressive mutations here.
With his crown of dark hair, Abbott seems like a perfect choice to play the reluctant beast in this variation on the beauty and the beast theme. But the screenplay is so drab and uninventive. Why on earth are there no guns in Blake’s survivalist father’s house? With her weird “Eraserhead” hairdo and mom jeans, Charlotte thinks Blake has contracted some sort of disease. She predictably becomes the women’s sole defender. The only thing that truly works in the film is a slowly moving POV shot in which we experience what Blake sees and hears as he transforms. If only Whannell had come with more of that sort of magic. But overall, this “Wolf” is “big” and “bad” in all the wrong ways.
‘Wolf Man’
Rating: R for bloody, violent content, grisly images, and some language.
Cast: Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth
Director: Leigh Whannell
Writers: Whannell, Corbett Tuck
Running Time: 103 minutes
Where to Watch: In theaters on January 17
Grade: C-
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