I went to see The Wolfman today. To be honest, I wasn't sure what to expect. I've seen the old Universal Studios Frankenstein and Dracula films, and it's possible I saw the Wolfman film, but I don't recall too much about it.
I'm familiar with werewolf legends in general: full moon raises the werewolf up; a silver bullet through the heart will kill them (or is that being shot anywhere with a silver bullet? and does it have to be a bullet, or can anything silver be used to do the deed? Imagine you had a stake make of silver and wood (like a candy cane). You could then hunt both werewolves and vampires with seeming impunity. And if you happened to come across some kind of hybrid vam-wolf or were-pire, you'd still be set because you could take care of both halves at once. [No, I don't stay up nights wondering about stuff like this. It just comes to me naturally.] [Also, not sure where the abs-ful werewolves come from, but those aren't real vampires, either. Underwear models do not make convincing vampires OR werewolves.]
Back to the movie.
This current The Wolfman is Universal Studios' attempt to resurrect the monster franchise. While there were some interesting things in the movie (Emily Blunt did a really good job as Gwen, I thought), if it were up to me, the movie itself is just not strong enough to warrant a franchise being established.
A movie being strong enough to spur a continuing story, though, has almost nothing to do with the story itself and everything to do with whether it made money or not. Only time will tell if Universal (and, more importantly, the accountants) declares The Wolfman a success and proceeds to another outing.
Aside: Hollywood accounting is a strange animal as far as accounting goes. For instance, Warner Bros. accounting declared that Batman (the first Tim Burton movie from 1989) made no profit. This was only mentioned in the lawsuit raised by someone due a percentage of the profits as stipulated in their contract. No profits, no payout, end of story. End aside.
Sorry, keep getting distracted away from the movie. And I guess that's my problem with it: I didn't find there to be much to get excited about during the movie. I saw a big plot twist from almost the beginning of the movie, so that wasn't a shock. The transformation of Benicio Del Toro into the werewolf was not that exciting.
Maybe this is a "hard problem", but I think the original transformation way back when was far more ahead of its time than this transformation is with all of the fantastic CGI tools available which are seemingly limited merely be one's imagination. One's imagination was not necessarily near any kind of breaking or even stretching point here.
See, it happened again: following another distraction away from talking about the movie. There's just not that much to say, really (and still I'm long winded). I don't regret seeing the movie. There were some intense moments, but I wanted more. I can't remember the director or the movie, but an actor on a talk show (or commentary) talked about a director only saying "better" after every take (meaning, "do it better") until the actor broke, stopped acting, and became the character, at which point the director was satisfied with the performance and wrapped for the day.
Closing 1: Universal, "better".
Closing 2: The Wolfman 2: Electric Boogaloo
