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75Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax.
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75Del Toro, with his melancholy-brute features, endows this raging beast with some of the ''Why me?'' poignance you may remember from Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in the original.
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63The Wolfman avoids what must have been the temptation to update its famous story. It plants itself securely in period, with a great-looking production set in 1891.
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63As a spooky midnight movie, The Wolfman is worth curling up with.
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63The movie is by no means good but it’s surprisingly enjoyable: a misty, moody Saturday-matinee monster-chiller-horror special.
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63Isn’t like a lot of modern horror movies. It’s not about torture, or dead children, or weepy vampires with great hair. It’s an attempt to reinvent the monster movie, which we're all about. It’s too bad it couldn’t have been contemporized. Period movies can so easily become parodies of portentousness, and that’s what happens with this one.
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63The matter-of-fact way everybody involved faces this supernatural horror drains most of the chills right out of it.
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63But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script, by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you!”
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60If you're going to pick the werewolf as your favorite monster, there's a lot to appreciate in the shaggy, imperfect but still fun new version of The Wolf Man.
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60Benicio Del Toro looks even more like Lon Chaney Sr. than Chaney Jr. did, and he’s a far better actor than the previous Wolf Man.
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50Unfortunately, brutality is about all this update of 1941's The Wolf Man can do well. Mutilations, decapitations and disembowelments are handled with aplomb in the first R-rated film from director Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III). But everything that doesn't involve gore feels like an afterthought.
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The movie's best special effect hands down is Anthony Hopkins as Talbot the Elder, who flounces around in a tiger stole and utters his lines with such a delicious madman twinkle you might want to snack on him yourself (ahhh-ROOooh).
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50What emerges is a banal horror film and a tepid action-adventure.
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50The root problem with The Wolfman is that it's a hybrid.
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An ill-considered, utterly unnecessary remake of the 1941 pulp classic "The Wolf Man" starring Lon Chaney Jr.
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Falls into that middling ground of horror film: neither scary enough to be exciting nor campy enough to be amusing.
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50The movie plays like a missed opportunity, with its by-the-numbers scares and a story that feels disjointed, hurried in some places, slow in others.
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50Johnston understands everything about old-fashioned werewolf movies except why they were scary.
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50This is fairly satisfying, particularly a ghoulish episode in a Victorian insane asylum.
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50A few stray livers and severed heads aside, this is a monster too polite for its own good.
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40Not bad enough to be considered a camp, guilty pleasure, it's more of a dull, defanged dirge with the reliably intriguing Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins turning in oddly disaffected performances.
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40An uneven tone and the feeling of too many cooks mars the finished product, but there are moments of beauty and real terror.
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40There's plenty of doom, gloom, and outright despair on hand here but very little genuine human emotion.
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40The Wolfman isn't crazy enough to be fun or multilayered enough to be touching. It's impossible to have any real feeling for this anguished beastie.
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40Here's the surprise of the new incarnation of The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro -- there isn't one. No bite either, or humor, or camp.
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40In this shaggy-dog version the wolfman’s story is both gratuitously bloody and, finally, bloodless.
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40The constant repetition of these shock tactics, in lieu of genuine suspense, makes The Wolfman feel cheap, despite the vast amounts obviously spent on Rick Heinrichs' opulent production design, the extensive visual effects, the more-than-effective special makeup effects, Milena Canonero's luxurious costumes, Danny Elfman's insistent score and the tony cast.
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38What have you done to The Wolfman, Hollywood? It’s got no kick to it. No fun either. And no real scares, which is more unforgivable.
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38The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.
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It's all too predictable and by the book. Even with a few plot twists that aren't in the original, I was hardly shocked or awed. While it's sleeker and more sophisticated than the Chaney version, this new Wolfman isn't any scarier.
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38Anthony Hopkins still does elegant menace better than anyone.
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33Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.
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The Wolfman isn’t scary. In fact, it isn’t much of anything.
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30A movie that’s full of sound, fury and unintentional camp -- and is still bafflingly inert.
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25Johnston fails to make a story set in 1891 England relevant to contemporary audiences.
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20Speed can be a virtue, but there’s something extremely off-putting about the way The Wolfman, Universal’s latest horror classic redux, races through its opening scenes.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 24 out of 47
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Mixed: 8 out of 47
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Negative: 15 out of 47
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A.Hurrell10