A plethora of reviews - The Wolfman and Solomon Kane (which would make an awesome film if you put the two together)

I have had so many external artistic stimuli over the past couple of weeks I can hardly keep up! Firstly, two films that registered on my radar ages ago and have taken a long time to get to the cinema have finally arrived: 'The Wolfman' remake, and 'Solomon Kane', which has been the subject of so much squee in my day-to-day life that everyone must be getting truly sick of it. Secondly, I have recently achieved my goal of three years and bought an Xbox 360 Elite machine, so there are many beautiful games to waste time with (though when is art ever a waste?) so I will probably leave those till a separate post (when I've finished them).

'The Wolfman' - I have to admit, in my extreme ignorance, that I haven't seen the original. I am familiar enough with the general set up of Universal monster movies that I feel I know the genre, but for the sake of integrity, I will review it as a stand-alone film rather than a remake. Perhaps when I see the original, I can review it as a remake. The reviews for this have been on the whole terrible, but I hadn't read them when I watched the film (something I wish I did more often). I really enjoyed it, but had a feeling that I was going to be one of the few people in the world who would. I loved it for the stunning Gothic visuals, the creepy, elegant score and the fact that, at least for some of the film, they used monster makeup and costumes instead of CGI (a particular bugbear of mine). This is the England of 'Wuthering Heights' and M.R. James, a haunted country of ancient mysteries and dramatic landscapes, of twisted trees and misty moors. It's an England I have longed to see on film, and for pure Gothic spectacle, it is incredible. It's also very nice to see Danny Elfman write a score that is appropriately creepy, but not with that Elfman-esque kookiness so overused now. It wasn't too up front, just sneaking in round the edges, but intensely beautiful when it needed to be.

Ok, so now the bad stuff (deep breath): this is a film which I enjoyed at the time, but in retrospect, and upon reading reviews of it seeking answers as to why others didn't think the same, it isn't all that good. The things I enjoyed are still there, but the script is pretty bad and I think Benicio del Toro, as the lead, expected more of the character's internal strife to come out on film. Unfortunately, subtlety was not the name of the game with most of the other performances, from Anthony Hopkins' eccentric old Welsh landowner to the rhubarb-mumbling villagers and the Mystic Gypsies (TM). Emily Blunt gives a passable performance, but she doesn't have that much to work with in Gwen, a rather limpid love interest. The stand out Hugo Weaving was stunning in what could have been a dull English bobby role, but in his hands turned into a thing of wonder. His inspector Abberline, a skeptical policeman who leads the hunt for the werewolf terrorising the local populace, is a charicature of the archetype, with a good dash of bumbling humour and heroism that makes him a breath of fresh air after del Toro's approach of gurning his way through the part. Also notable is the underused Art Malik as Singh, Sir John Talbot's manservant.

The pace is uneven, with too much action for a tense horror and too little to make it exciting. The trip to the asylum in London feels like they decided that because every film in the Gothic Victorian style has to have an asylum, they had better include one too. The whole London segment could easily be cut out, as indeed it did not feature in the original as far as I am aware. Large parts of this film could have been taken out, but when it comes down to it, there is little to replace it. Maybe a more gradual exploration of the change Laurence Talbot undergoes? Whole months go by in the blink of an eye, the film lurching from one full moon to the next, as apparently the director (or editor - I think this was probably messed around with quite a bit) thought the bits with the werewolf in were the most important ones.

In conclusion, I enjoyed it and it's worth a watch, but it isn't a classic by any means. 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' managed to be glorious and reasonably well-respected despite really awful flaws. I think this is too self-conscious of its place in the canon, and yet fills the time with over-the-top gory action scenes. If it had let go a bit, the audience would have had a lot more fun. If it had been more restrained and had better scripting, it would have been more of a homage to the 1941. Instead, like the wolfman himself, it is caught between savage, silly fun and ponderous, intellectual exploration, without ever balancing the two.

Hm. I'll do Solomon Kane in a separate review, as these always seem to end up very long...