MOVIE REVIEW – Universal’s latest monster reboot is a dark and toothless January dud. Leigh Whannell did a stellar job modernizing “The Invisible Man,” but he’s clearly bitten off more than he can chew with werewolves. Instead of ratcheting up the tension, the director tries to sell the movie with unconvincing CGI and cheap jump scares, and boy, does he miss the mark.

What if a man… was also a wolf? It’s a question that’s tickled filmmakers’ fancies for over a century, inspiring a monster movie classic (George Waggner’s The Wolf Man), a handful of enduring cult favorites (“An American Werewolf in London,” “Ginger Snaps,” etc.), and a seemingly endless parade of howlingly bad misfires from otherwise reliable directors. Mike Nichols’ Wolf was seductively bizarre enough to stand on its own two feet, but Joe Johnston’s “The Wolf Man” — a $150 million vehicle for Benicio del Toro that reeked of Universal’s desperation to update its oldest horror IP — was neutered by studio interference, much like Miramax declawed Wes Craven’s “Cursed” a few years prior. And of course, the “Dark Universe” mega-franchise, which was supposed to resurrect so many of Lon Chaney Jr.’s immortal roles, imploded before the first full moon even rose.

Tail Between Its Legs

Given that track record, maybe the most surprising thing about Leigh Whannell’s new Wolf Man flick is that, despite being unburdened by the budget and world-building baggage of its predecessors, it’s every bit as much of a train wreck as the studio’s other attempts to make lycanthropy great again. Actually, it’s worse, because it stumbles in the same ways: murky, soulless, and riddled with laughable special effects (the prosthetics are well-crafted, but their hyper-realism turns into self-parody after the film abandons its emotional core). Matilda Firth is also horribly bad as a child actor, and Julia Garner didn’t shine either as a “loving wife” and “worried mother”. I felt like she was still acting in Ozark. This is a real gut punch to a reboot that tries so hard to do something new with the source material; that tries so hard to replicate Whannell’s success with “The Invisible Man” by marrying timeless fears with modern sensibilities. Working from a script he co-wrote with his wife, Corbett Tuck, the director poses the sub-genre’s defining question with a radically new emphasis (one that focuses less on the beast within and more on the humanity that keeps it at bay), only to arrive at an all-too-familiar answer. What if a man were also a wolf? It would look really dumb.

You don’t need the “Wolf Vision” that Whannell frequently throws in your face throughout the movie to see that his take on the classic monster had the potential to be something a bit smarter. The pieces are all there, even if Wolf Man doesn’t have the slightest interest in playing with them. Like the vast majority of modern studio horror flicks, Wolf Man is really just a trauma metaphor stretched out over three acts. The first act holds all the promise, as a tense prologue introduces us to a pre-teen kid, Blake, whose military-like father (Sam Jaeger, all menacing, toxic machismo) is hell-bent on teaching his son how to survive in the big bad world on his own. I’m not really sure why Blake’s dad insists on raising his son in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, where locals are being terrorized by a man-eating creature, especially since he’s so preoccupied with his only child’s safety. But determined parents aren’t necessarily good ones.

“Dad, Why Is Hair Growing on Your Back?!”

That, alarmingly, becomes the running theme in a movie that never has enough room to stretch its legs. When the story picks up 30 years later, we find that Blake (Christopher Abbott), now a neurotic father himself, is so terrified of his daughter getting hurt that this fear seems to affect his decision-making. Case in point: When Blake receives a letter stating that his missing father has been declared legally deceased, his first instinct is to ditch San Francisco, load young Ginger (Matilda Firth) and his journalist wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), into a U-Haul, and force them to spend the summer in the same house that scared him to death as a kid. In the same off-the-grid stretch of Oregon hillside (New Zealand, of all places) that inspired his dad to make panicked CB radio calls every night before he finally disappeared into the woods. As a parent, few things are worse than the thought of your own child being afraid of you. For some reason, Blake is drawn to find out what those things might be. Spoiler alert: One of them is a Wolf Man.

It’s a curious but appreciably intimate way to set up the stakes of a not-so-classic monster movie, as Whannell grounds the horror-to-come in an age-old crisis that previous generations of men were expected to resolve in less emotional terms. How do we square our animal instinct for safety and providing with our capacity to love? How do we keep our children alive without betraying the part of ourselves – and each other – that has evolved beyond the basic demands of survival? As an unemployed writer who’s adopted the traditional mother role in his family (much to his wife’s chagrin, whose professional ambitions have driven a wedge between her and their daughter), Blake comes across as a total beta male at the start of this movie. I shudder to think of the reactionary YouTube commentaries that will be inspired by the scene where he happily wears his daughter’s lipstick. When Blake is bitten by a werewolf on the road to his dad’s farmhouse (a werewolf that only he can stop from eating Charlotte and Ginger), it triggers a civil war in his soul. A civil war whose progress is measured in back hair, bad skin, and some newly heightened senses. “Hills Fever” is one hell of a drug! Holed up in his childhood home and desperate to keep his loved ones safe until sunrise, Blake has to fend off not only the beast outside, but also the monster within. (Charlotte’s only job is to be punished for chasing her career, and then rewarded for reclaiming the far more conservative role of a mother.)

When Wolf Bites Wolf

It’s a cleverly intimate premise that’s very much in line with Whannell’s approach to The Invisible Man (which would have been a fitting title for Wolf Man as well), and one that Abbott is game to explore. Pivoting a werewolf movie away from the id in favor of the superego is like making a vampire movie about the moral victory of being vegan, but Abbott is the kind of actor who brings a unique truth to every moment, and his early scenes with Garner are layered with a level of lived-in honesty that’s practically unheard of in recent studio horror. Abbott’s seeming allergy to emotional phoniness is by far Wolf Man’s greatest asset, but – as those lucky few who saw “Kraven the Hunter” might recall – it can also be a major liability for any film that loses faith in itself. And as “Wolf Man” abandons its nuanced approach to become a dim, cramped, and tedious siege movie about a growling creature trying to eat the people holed up in a rotting farmhouse, the reality of Abbott’s performance is consumed by the ridiculousness of watching him turn into a wet dog.

Blake’s inner turmoil is mirrored by the film’s (lack of) tension between intergenerational trauma and cheap jump scares, which is less a tug-of-war than an unconditional surrender. The darkened farmhouse is a dull setting for the nightmare that Wolf Man unleashes, and the monster at the door never feels like a real threat. For one, it’s too stupid to just break in through a window. For another, it becomes less frightening with every step of Blake’s transformation, as our hero’s appearance prepares us to face the terror outside. New hair in strange places, teeth problems, a growing inability to understand his wife… brace yourselves for the unimaginable horror of a man approaching 40!

This Wolf Has No Teeth

Tempting as it is to applaud Whannell for steering clear of bad CGI or cheap Rick Baker knock-off masks, the ultra-grounded approach is a poor fit for a movie that feels like it’s been cut to the bone, leaving us with little more than some very predictable plot developments and a handful of extremely uninspired werewolf fights. Wolf Man is a soft-hearted story that’s been squeezed into the shape of a lean and mean January programmer, and while Whannell manages to eke out a few decent moments from that setup (a pitch-black barn encounter almost makes up for a lackluster greenhouse scene that fails to generate any tension), most of the scares lack the same thought that went into the film’s discarded story, and the occasional bits of R-rated gore aren’t gnarly enough to make up the difference. If anything, the scene where Blake starts to gnaw off his own arm is the most relatable part of the movie.

A semi-feral drama about parental fears that isn’t nearly scary enough to catalyze those concerns into the action it puts on screen, Wolf Man runs away from its potential with its tail between its legs. “There is nothing here worth dying for,” reads the “no trespassing” sign on the childhood home where Blake inexplicably returns with his wife and daughter. There’s nothing here worth watching, either.

   -Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-