For pretty much my entire life, I've wanted to be a werewolf. Of the monster pantheon, werewolves have always been the most bad-ass of the bunch. For the most part they live normal lives, but once a month they become superheroes (or villains, depending on where they chose to be when they change). Unfortunately, werewolves aren't real (or are they? No they are not), so I am forced to live my lycanthropic lifestyle vicariously through movies and videogames. Sadly, both of these mediums rarely do werewolves justice. Case in point: The Wolfman.
The Wolfman had a lot of things going for it; Benecio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, this trailer, the director of Honey I Shrunk The Kids... the title of best werewolf movie was ripe for the taking. But, instead of being 90+ minutes of lupine awesomeness, The Wolfman was a plodding, joyless, boring mess of inconsistent accents, stilted, cliche ridden dialogue, a complete lack of suspense and as much characterization as is shown in the aforementioned trailer. People have backstories and histories, but there previous lives do very little to inform their choices in the film. Lawrence, the main character, is an actor for some reason. This bit of information is never relevant. It doesn't have anything to do with what the character does or says, it's just an interesting bit of trivia (I suppose it's possible that it's a nod to the original wolfman movie, but I've never seen it, so I wouldn't know). Hugo Weaving is supposedly playing Inspector Aberline, the detective in charge of the Jack the Ripper murders. This too is mentioned in nothing more than a throw away line. In fact, most of the lines in this movie are just unresponsive bits of pronouncement. Benicio will walk into a room and, apropos of nothing, will say something like "I wish things were different" and that will be an entire scene.
This movie suffers from what a lot of werewolf movies suffer from (At this point I should probably mention that I have not seen that many werewolf movies. I've only seen one of the Howling movies, Silver Bullet, Van Helsing, all of the Underworld Movies, Both American Werewolf Movies, Trick r' Treat... that might be it), and that is having the plot of a werewolf movie. The plot goes something like this; Main character doesn't believe in werewolves, gets attacked by a werewolf, becomes a werewolf, kills people, feels guilty, becomes a werewolf again, dies. The exception to this rule are movies about werewolves that also involve other monsters, especially vampires (and maybe the Ginger Snaps movies, I've never seen those). The problems with this kind of plot are: 1. you know the main character is going to die, so it's difficult to have any sort of emotional investment in them, 2. because of the werewolf mythology (ie; the Full Moon) the movie has to take place over a long period of time (usually over 2 to 3 months, which will give you 3-4 transformations), and these movies aren't very good with dealing with that much time compression, so there's a lot of montages of being in a coma or walking around instead of building containment rooms or saferooms or driving to unpopulated areas. The movies just tread water until it's time for another transformation.
One of my life goals is to add something significant to the Werewolf movie Genre, which won't be too hard, since most werewolf movies blow.
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