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“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman opens with that portentous rhyme, lifted wholesale from the original 1940 film with Lon Chaney Jr. It’s the first sign that this new wolf will retain fidelity to its predecessor. Several others follow; there is a hulking Victorian mansion and moonlit moors, the make-up design and characters are remarkably similar, and Larry Talbot is once again a lost soul fearing the dread and torment that the next full moon brings.

What’s wrong here is the tone, which heads out into unintentional camp, and the script, that fails to make the audience feel Talbot’s pain and conflict.

On the level of recreation and re-invention, Johnston has done a stunning job with the surface details of his Wolfman. The film is actually set a bit later than the original, now moved to Victorian England, which provides endless scenes of horse drawn carriages careening over gray, wet country roads and characters scrabbling about in the dark, holding their oil lamps close to their faces so the shadows can dance sinisterly. Later in London, the werewolf scrabbles across gothic architecture to howl balefully at the moon.

Danny Elfman does a fine job with the soundtrack, creating screeching moments of diabolical terror and rising crescendos of melodramatic suspense. Rick Baker, the make-up artist who brought us that incredible transformation scene in American Werewolf in London, renders a wolfman instantly recognizable as the original beast, but decked out with a more savage, animal flare. There’s a stunning attention to detail in the features; you can see every mismatched tooth, and of course,  his hair is perfect.

On the acting front, there’s a team of great performers, some of which are wasted and others who break the chains of the script and run amok all over the film, mauling and tearing the scenery with a lupine glee. The wasted ones, unfortunately, are Benicio Del Toro as Larry Talbot and Emily Blunt as Gwen, Talbot’s late brother’s fiancee.  If you rewatch the original, and note Lon Chaney Jr’s nonchalant, laid-back performance as Larry, you can see what Del Toro was going for here. He captures Chaney’s look, and his mannerisms, but the script has him written as a cowering man-child, hiding in his father’s shadow and he never develops any further.

Emily Blunt is a beautiful and talented actress, and she looks stunning running through the woods, or dangling from a waterfall, or anytime the moonlight catches her frightened gaze (my, what big eyes you have!). Like, Del Toro though, she is left with very little to do but pretend that the proposed romance between them actually exists as anything more than a few throwaway lines.

The two actors who do come out on top despite the screenplay’s attempt to strand them are Hugo Weaving and Anthony Hopkins. They are working at the same level as the film’s visual effects and its surprisingly gory violence; way, way, over-the-top. Weaving is a Scotland Yard detective complete with bowler hat, mutton-chops and baffling ability to show up and make a complete and utter mess of things every single time. He sort of knows he is an after thought and he injects as much classic swagger into the character as possible. When he’s chasing the wolf through London he might as well be in one of those classic horror comics where characters stop and exclaim things like “Hark! Do you hear that? Silence!!”

Hopkins plays Lord Talbot, Larry’s father, and he’s one of the best reasons to see the new movie. When things start sagging in the middle, Hopkins puts on his best predatory grin, narrows his eyes, gnashes his teeth and starts making the elder Talbot as sinister as he possibly can. You get the feeling he only uses candles so he can sit in the shadows and leer out at his guests. He’s more paunchy and feral than I would have expected, and instead of channeling Lecter or Van Helsing, or any of his other notable madmen, he reminded me as nothing so much as a latter-day Orson Welles. Blustery, self-posessed and constantly sneering, I half expected him to growl the words ‘Rosebud’ before it was all over.

As a director, Johnston makes good use of those crazy performances and he tries to help the serious tone of the Larry and Gewn storyline, but the best he can come up with a repeated shots of a time-lapse moon racing behind billowing clouds or people galloping on horseback into the foreboding night. He does give us a few great action sequences, including a particularly effective assault on the gypsy camp where Talbot is bitten.

When the wolfman is finally seen in full, prowling about and ripping off heads and playing keep-away with the villager’s spleens, the visual effects are surprisingly good. It isn’t all cgi, and most of it is well used, save for the scenes where we see the wolf in full gallop across the rooftops or through the forest. Then, he’s nothing more than a furry animated ball, hopped up on Red Bull. When he pulls a Kong in London and starts leaping high into the air, the movie moves almost too close to a superhero tone.

Perhaps, that would have been the way to go; a completely over-the-top, comic-book approach. This new Wolfman is entirely too silly to work as a proper horror film, and right now there’s just too much ponderous dialogue and ham-fisted father/son melodrama to really enjoy the rest. I laughed through a great deal of the movie, but I am not sure that’s what the filmmakers wanted. For fans of the wolfman or of monster movies in general, I tend to think you will find things to like and admire here. I was entertained, but also sincerely disappointed. This was a missed opportunity, and the human soul that the first wolf had is absent in this one.

But, if you, like myself, are sometimes just in one of those moods that wants nothing more than to see a werewolf stalking his victims through the fog-shrouded forest, than The Wolfman might be what you are looking for. And if you too, come out disappointed, well, you can always go home and rewatch the original.

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