Chad Taylor

Shant quit ripping

I thought about Jack the Ripper a lot during The Wolfman, as well as Dracula and that book about girls running across the moors. The first half of the movie (actually the first two-thirds slashed down to span kidult attention) is classic Hammer Horror meets steampunk, as prescribed by the Rules of Bram: the tourist train twisting deep into the foreign land; letters from Mina -- sorry, Gwen (Emily Blunt); the Character Actor Pub; the handsome Jonathan Harker -- again, sorry, Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro); the asylum; the pseudo science; the address to a tiered medical audience. It's all lifted in solemn and direct tribute to Francis Ford Coppola's maligned-at-the-time Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). (Which I always considered near-perfect - is it finally getting the respect it deserves?)

I enjoyed The Wolfman's lifting, and the pastiche, and the flickering candle camp of the start of the film. The story's told in a hell of a rush, though so the filmmakers (sorry #3: the producers) can rush to the Big Face Off: a showdown between werewolves. This is where the movie stopped being a tribute to things I enjoy and suddenly became Wolverine. All movies have to have a Big Face Off now so that children will pay to see them and thus cover the overheads it took to computer generate said sequence, but even as the first half (two thirds) of the movie howled past I was hoping for a trade off, namely that director Joe Johnston (or someone - even old guy editor Walter Murch) - would ape not only the look and feel of classic Hammer films but also the structure. The structure being: very, very slow build up to The Terrible Thing (as per the first para: Stoker / steampunk / Victoriana rules etc); flash of psychosis and/or nudity somewhere along the line; lots of shadows and finally, only at the very end, The Terrible Thing Revealed. Mike Nichols followed this rule pretty closely with Wolf (1994) and it worked great. In fact, it worked as recently as From Hell (2001). But thanks to franchise fucking, nerves, big studios, The Kids, whatever, The Wolfman went all X-Men in the end.

It's a shame. The cast is fantastic, the sets and locations perfect, the acting just right. Anthony Hopkins is a gold-plated prick, Ms Blunt is distressed and lovely, and Benicio is the ill-fated outsider. There's an incredible movie in here waiting to bust out. Director's cut, maybe...