The Wolfman (2010)

Some 69 years after the original The Wolf Man, Benicio del Toro and some people with access to CGI think they can do better. A CGI wolfman splits a guy open in the opening scene; it's bloody and loud and dramatic, and already contains more action than all of the original combined.

Benicio takes a Harry Potter train back home to visit his estranged father, Anthony Hopkins, because, like we know since we just watched this film, his brother is dead. The guy across from him on the train has the silver wolf-headed cane, which he swirls around suggestively at the camera. He gives it to Benicio, who shows us that it's also a weird sci-fi dagger.

The costumes are absurdly complicated and change frequently. It's more dramatically environmental than the original, with longer period of silence and more establishing shots. People talk slower, with more pauses, but, like the original, it's quite chatty. The town is CGI'd to look like an adorable village. Down at the pub, the racist townsfolk argue about whether it's gypsies or werewolves murdering the locals. People are more immediately open to the werewolf theory in this remake.

Benicio doesn't have to stalk Gwen from across the town with his telescope; she just lives in the mansion already. Instead of a strong, proud, opinionated woman, this Gwen is the brother's emotionally distraught widow who sulks around and cries.

It's over-acted and overly-dramatic, with this style of presenting every single conversation and event as important and dramatic, but it's slow to actually establish something for the viewer to care about. Benicio has become a detective and a wolf is ripping dozens of people apart and there's screaming and shooting and rescuing women and children and loud snarls and booming drums… but for what? In the original, he was just hitting on a girl at this point, but I was more invested in it.

In the stylish, misty CGI Stonehenge, Benicio is bitten badly on the neck. The gypsy woman saves him, even though she knows he'll become a murderous werewolf as well. He's taken home, where he hallucinates Gollum. His brother's widow, who had left for London, is back for no reason and cares for him night and day. He didn't kill anything in the woods before the wolf attack, so the whole whodunit mystery – the main plot of the original – is not recreated. They simply know there is a beast and they're hunting it. Benicio believes in werewolves, as does the Sikh groundskeeper who has a box of silver bullets.

Inspector Elrond shows up from Rivendell Scotland Yard to interview Benicio about what happened in the woods. He accuses Benicio of murder, even though there were dozens and dozens and dozens of witnesses. Maybe they shouldn't have stuffed the woods full of people if they want us to believe there was some doubt. The desire to butcher more extras on screen beat out the desire to have a believable character motive.

Benicio teaches Gwen to skip stones, so she falls in love with him. Their relationship is shallow and severely underdeveloped. He starts developing superhuman hearing, and the townsfolk come to kill him because they know he's cursed. This is yet another werewolf movie where they don't know what to do with the middle of it because between they need to waste an hour between him getting infected and him transforming and murdering, but they didn't establish any more encompassing plot. There's nothing more than "I guess I'm probably a werewolf, and that's going to be inconvenient later." And then we wait while it drags on, and on and on.

His big transition is CGI, and looks like any CGI. They kept him an upright man-shaped wolfman, keeping with the 1941 tradition. He kills piles of people, because they don't really have anything else to do.

He gets sent to an asylum, a major break from the original film. They get to waste a lot of time on disjointed hallucinations and flashbacks, none of which are necessary. His father doesn't care, because he's also a werewolf, but he takes it as an excuse to monologue.

His asylum doctor holds a seminar in front of the full moon to show that he won't become a werewolf. He becomes a werewolf and mutilates dozens and dozens. Elrond witnesses and escapes, so he knows the curse is real. Benicio goes and jumps around on roof gargoyles because he forgot how wolves work. Everybody gets overly excited and there's a street/roof/car/streetcar chase, and we're long out of "remake" territory.

Movies with high production value and nothing to say are somehow less bearable than poorly made low-budget films. It's a different, deeper, more profound type of boredom as you wait in vain for the $150 million they spent on this to come to something.

Father and son have a big CGI fight, slapping bellies in midair like a Star Wars prequel. The final battle has no real stakes, a bunch of weird cuts, and a stupid conclusion. Elrond and Gwen shows up for another stupid conclusion. All of Danny Elfman's dramatic music still can't bring me to care at all about what happens.