It’s been over 20 years since a filmmaker did anything remotely original with the whole werewolf genre with Dog Soldiers.
Since then, we’ve been subjected to the Twilight series and whatever the hell The Wolf of Snow Hollow was supposed to be. Don’t be fooled by the reviews on that latter one, you’ll be rooting for the werewolf, which isn’t a werewolf just a tall man in wolf disguise who somehow has super-human strength. It sucks.
Wolf Man at one point ha Ryan Gosling attached. But he left and Christopher Abbott was brought in. While the actor was good in the Hulu series Catch-22, he’s useless in this role. But the worse actor is Julia Garner with her Justin Timberlake Ramon-noodle hair and an overall sense she doesn’t want to be in the movie. Maybe her role on Ozark was just good writing. But after seeing her in Inventing Anna, I’m not impressed.
The movie has a great beginning that builds tension and plays with our expectations of cheap jump scares. If the rest of the movie had been like this prologue, it might have worked. But the fact Universal dumped this movie in the middle of January shows how little faith they had in it.
Abbot plays Blake Lovell who is a writer living in San Francisco but his marriage to his wife, Charlotte (Garner), is rocky mainly because they seem to be in two different movies. When he learns his estranged father, Grady (Sam Jeager), has died, they head north to the Oregon mountains to take a vacation at the old house he grew up in.
Of course, things go bad when Blake sees something on the road and swerves thus getting into a car wreck. He had just picked up an old friend, Derek (Benedict Hardie), to give a ride. Derek serves no other purpose but to be werewolf Alpo as he is killed and Blake is scratched on the arm.
Blake, Charlotte and their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), just happen to be in a quick 300-meter dash from the house so they’re able to run and get it in the abandoned house in time. Oh, if you haven’t guessed by now, the big bad wolf is Grady. And while they deal with Grady outside, they must also deal with Blake inside slowly turning into a werewolf himself.
Yes, it’s boring. It could’ve been a good movie. But most scenes take place in the dark and there’s not much tension. Even a werewolf-a-werewolf fight between Blake and Grady is so poorly directed and edited, you don’t care.
The movie was directed and co-written by Leigh Whannell, who made The Invisible Man in 2020 into a good thriller. I don’t know what he added to the script, but I can see why Gosling left.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 