Friday, October 29, 2010

The Past is a Wilderness of Horrors

The Wolfman (2010)
directed by Joe Johnston
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

It depressed me to see Art Malik - who I first knew from The Jewel in the Crown but last watched in True Lies - forced to dress as one more brown-skinned stereotype, this time a riff on Morgan Freeman's Azeem. I knew the wolf CGI would be bad, but I didn't realize how much of the movie would look similarly cartoonish. Why buy the fake moon when the real one is so reliable? Are fake trees easier for fake monsters to run through?

Not enough movies set in rural England utilize standing stones for mist-laden mysteries. This one does. But Benicio Del Toro is an actor (I'd argue) who remains more famous for having sex with Scarlett Johansson in an elevator than any role he's played. Why hire the celebrity if you want him to timidly seduce the very dull Emily Blunt over a lesson in skipping rocks?

More importantly, if Anthony Hopkins' John Talbot "loves life" as much as he claims, why does he continue to live in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do but hunt the occasional gypsy and roam about his empty home? It isn't Hannibal Lecter that directors ask him to keep playing, but the surly patriarch from Legends of the Fall. Hugo Weaving is a good city man out among hicks who underestimate him, and he, at least, makes the case for an A-list cast every time.