The Wolfman (2010)

Picture this: you’re in a relationship with someone and things have started to go sour. Your person’s personality has become predictable and tiresome; traits that used to be quirky, exciting, and edgy now come off as eye-rollingly dull and predictable.

Sure, you still find this person attractive in some way. You started dating Staley McBlando for a reason—most likely relating to some combination of physical attractiveness and personality that they do, in fact, possess. However, at this moment in time, for whatever reason, you realize that you are just so freaking bored with this particular variation of your usual match’s patchwork of personal qualities that you have to get up from your table at the restaurant you always go to and walk out that familiar door, get in your car and drive as far away as you can get in an hour’s time. Right now.

Such is my relationship with werewolf movies. Despite the fact (or maybe because of?) their often formulaic nature, I find myself attracted to them again and again. My interest is snared by their promises of a tortured, brooding protagonist, silly mythologies of the occult, gory action sequences, and usually not very nuanced metaphors pertaining to the overlap in the human psyche between compassionate humanity and brutal animal instincts.

I freely admit that even though werewolf movies are usually awful when gauged by the standards applied to other cinema, I wholeheartedly enjoy watching them, laughing at them, and cringing at all the spilled guts and ridiculously bad acting. Usually if a movie offers me even one of the aforementioned traits I can walk away saying I enjoyed it. Even Wes Craven’s Cursed (2005), with its truly awful amateurish acting and hilariously cheesy dialogue, was one that I can say I genuinely enjoyed watching and was in some way entertained by, Christina Ricci and all.

But do you know what? Sitting through the colossally dismal The Wolfman the other night I felt like I was at the end of a stale relationship. Maybe it was the endless series of sucker-punch, sudden loud noise scare tactics. Or perhaps it was the hackneyed storyline that was somehow riddled with plot holes so gaping as to have an alienating effect. It might have been the usually sultry Benicio Del Toro’s abhorrent and irritating American accent, or Anthony Hopkins’s half-assed delivery of all his pointless lines. One definite source of my disgust was the stupid choice of not updating the look of the actual wolfman himself from the 1941 classic upon which this picture was based. Seriously, we decided to keep the black plastic dog nose, now painstakingly rendered in CGI? Come on!

Bottom line: approximately five to ten seconds of this was good*, the rest was dumb. Even to someone owns the soundtrack of American Werewolf in Paris and thinks The Howling III: The Marsupials is a good way to spend a Friday night.

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* these five to ten seconds being 1) the opening credits and 2) the brief moment when Benicio del Toro stares hungrily at Emily Blunt’s décolletage with a blank look of arousal.