After royally fucking up The Invisible Man, I’m surprised Universal was dumb enough to let writer/director Leigh Whannell tackle another one of their beloved monster properties. As with The Invisible Man, Whannell shows he would rather do his own riff on the classic monsters without really honoring what came before. It’s like he feels carte blanche to make up his own shit while remaining confident that people will still see it based on the brand name alone. However, in doing so, he just reinforces the obvious fact that he doesn’t have a clue as to what made the original monsters so special in the first place.
Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) is a writer who brings his wife (Julia Garner) and kid (Matilda Firth) back to his family home in the backwoods of Oregon. When he is wounded by a deranged animal man, Blake slowly becomes sick. Eventually, he turns into a monster and comes after his family.
I will say Wolf Man is a slight improvement over Whannell’s The Invisible Man redo, although that’s not saying a helluva lot. Whannell does deliver at least one moderately suspenseful sequence (the car accident scene), but for the most part, he spends too much of the movie twiddling his thumbs when he should be delivering the goods. I will say I liked the family’s name.
Ultimately, it all just feels hackneyed and lame. First of all, the Wolf Man design is terrible. This might be the first Wolf Man in history who gets LESS hairy as he transforms. In fact, he kind of looks like the elf from Elves. I’m not kidding. Where’s Jack Pierce and Rick Baker when you need them?
It also hurts the film that he transforms so slowly. Not only does it rob us of a cool transformation scene, it gives Abbott nothing to work with. He loses his ability to speak halfway through and his grunting and growling does little to help convey his predicament to the audience.
Speaking of acting, the leads are rather bland and have zero chemistry. In every scene it feels like they’re actors who just met and are performing a scene together for the first time as there is absolutely no connection between them. It doesn’t help that the dialogue among the family members often sounds like something out of a group therapy session.
The ending is the pits too. Not only is it among the worst conclusions to a werewolf movie ever captured on film, it has to be one of the most anticlimactic endings in a major studio release in some time. In short, this Wolf Man is nothing to howl about.
