Last issue I said there was nothing coming out in theatres in the near future. Surprise, surprise folks; I lied, but now we’re at the dregs of the year. From here until Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland comes out at the beginning of March, we have a big dead zone of really terrible-looking flicks. But before I break down and decide to look at a Channing Tatum love story about a soldier falling in love with a conservative college student, we have one movie left to look at.
Benicio del Toro really has had a quiet last few years. Outside of the mega-long Cuban biopic Che, which came out last year, Del Toro has been eerily silent since the 2005 hit Sin City. So what has he been up to in all this time? Outside of starring in a 3 Stooges movie later this year, Benicio has been reviving one of the film legends from the silver age. The Wolfman – being one part of Universal’s horror troupe in the mid forties with such greats as Dracula and Swamp Thing – has really not changed much since its inaugural movie was released almost 70 years ago. Benicio, with one of the most Central-American names and appearances in Hollywood, has to return to his hometown of a sleepy English village upon news of his (much more English) brother’s death brought out by a malicious ravaging. At risk of spoiling the movie for you, everything remains intact from classic werewolf lore; silver bullets, full moons, pants that refuse to rip with the rest of the costume, are all very apparent in this movie. No strange new twists, just sticking to the typical monster movie formula that had made it successful for these past seven decades.
And you know what? It kind of works. Looking at the trailer, it gives me a little glint of hope coming from same guy that directed Jurassic Park III. This movie does not set out to be an innovator in any sense; rather it seems to borrow from previous films to add them to make at least an entertaining trailer. By giving the Victorian Era the same hint of grunge that was present in The Prestige, adding camera effects that are more real feeling than, say, Transformers 2 constant jittering, and by keeping the CG effects tasteful and not overused, the movie comes off as a much more fun ride than if it was over-hyped as a typical summer blockbuster.
Despite being terribly un-English, Benicio is a great actor. Put him together with Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaving (of V for Vendetta fame), and that’s a pretty good line-up for a flick. It’s not going to be remembered by the time the snow thaws out. But it is more than enough to tide movie-hungry fanatics until something with a little more notoriety comes out. I won’t exactly recommend you to drop everything you’re doing to go watch it, but if you’re looking for a cure for the winter blahs, I would kindly point you in that direction. Wolfman howls onto the screens on February 12th, which gives you a bit of time to re-watch Avatar a few more times before you go out to see this one.