The Wolfman (Review)

If The Wolfman has a weakness, it's this: Hollywood Geography. It exists in one of those worlds which only exist in film, where Whitehall is a street away from the British Museum, Chatsworth sits in darkest Exmoor, and Dorset is a brisk twenty-minute walk from Charing Cross. It's something I've kinda come to expect from my films by now, but that doesn't mean I'm not irritated when it happens. Hang on!, I think as I munch my popcorn. Since when has Somerset House been a Psychiatric Hospital? - and bang goes my suspension of disbelief.

If I'm being honest, I went to see The Wolfman in expectation of it being complete crap. I hadn't been planning to see it, but the she-David insisted as a Valentines Day treat - it'd be something scary so she could scream and clutch at me because, lets be honest, she doesn't get many opportunities to do that under normal circumstances. It was with the tread of weary trepidation that I entered the cinema expecting something unwatchably poor and what I got instead was unobjectionable tosh. Yes, it's schlock, but schlock in the same way that the 1930's Lon Chaney Jr. Wolfman (which it homages enthusiastically) was tosh: tongue in cheek, doesn't take itself seriously and over the top in all the right places.

Such is the power of superstar economics that it is increasingly easy to put anything at all up on screen; special effects technology is almost perfect and A-List actors will pay back the price of their casting by international ticket receipts from emerging markets, so I'm not overly concerned by such things any more. Increasingly what I look for in films is whether the plot makes sense - which is why I'm offensively dismissive about, say, GI Joe, or Ultraviolet - and the thing I liked about The Wolfman was that, provided you accept the existence of wolfmen per se, it all hung together very neatly. You've got Benico del Toro being doomed and generally tortured, Anthony Hopkins taking large bites out of the scenery (figuratively and literally), and Hugo Weaving declaiming portentious lines as Elrond Agent Smith Inspector Aberline*, werewolf hunter extraordinaire.

There are all the staples of 30's horror; strange figures loping through the moonlit mist, mysterious gypsies, manservants with a secret and screaming heroines with heaving bosoms and it all comes together rather nicely. Like I say, complete tosh, but enjoyable tosh that looks really nice. There are criticisms (such as the 'clash of the CGI titans' werewolf fight at the end), but for once I overlooked them because I was having fun.

^{*The film does the real historical person of Aberline a massive disservice I must say.}