No Room In Hell

Maybe the moon was full when some Hollywood lunatic decided to remake The Wolfman (1941), but not much thought was put into the project after that. How can anything with Anthony Hopkins and a budget to CGI enough blood splatter to fill a swimming pool go wrong? Well frankly, it goes like this.

The characters (with one exception) are boring and brutish, the trappings of their drab atmosphere just permeated too deeply, and we end up with flat performances. Oscar winning Sir Anthony Hopkins plays Sir John Talbot whose son Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) returns home after learning that his brother has been missing. Hopkins mostly mopes around like an aging bad ass while yawning out creepy one-liners and ends up looking like a mix of his characters from Legends of the Fall and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Del Toro suffers from a similar bland personality of an emo kid whose favorite goth band has just canceled their concert a night before the show. I can’t imagine director Joe Johnston could be to blame for this awkward tone with a resume featuring, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer, The Pagemaster, Jumanji, and Jurassic Park III.  How could you go wrong?       

The plot tries to hinge itself on Lawrence’s troubled past where he witnessed his mother’s suicide and now must return to the site of his mother’s death to discover why his brother has also met a grizzly end. Long-story-short, Lawrence realizes his memories are false and his mother was also killed by an obvious plot twist that reveals the true identity of the beast, but not before Lawrence tangles with the werewolf and also contracts the curse.

Curses and uninspired writing aside, the movies is visually fun, and I think that is all the filmmaker set out to accomplish here since the movie makes no attempts to be original, to create compelling characters, a compelling atmosphere, or an interesting story line. Instead, the audience is given a laser light show of dismembered limbs, decapitations, disembowelments, and a climatic werewolf on werewolf battle ala Underworld. It’s fun to watch, but it sure as shit ain’t Shakespeare.

The saving grace is Hugo Weaving who portrays an aloof Scotland Yard inspector named Abberline whose presence on the screen is missed the second he leaves it. Weaving unleashes his usual smug delivery of mundane lines, just dragging out syllables, in ways only he can and brings the Abberline character to life in another wise lifeless cast of dull characters. If you need further proof then check out how epic he looks fighting the werewolf below…

Maybe not, but Weaving performance is still the only reason to see this film, unless you’re a die hard werewolf fan that wants to see a lot of cool CGI slayings. Don’t show up looking for substance, because it just isn’t here.

Somewhere in the distance I think I hear Lon Chaney Jr. howling at the moon…mournfully.