The Wolfman (2010)

Lame, uneventful turd of a monster movie despite a game, if underused cast, a hefty bounty of Gothic gore, and an absolutely kickass Rick Baker Wolfman design. The retarded plot is as follows: Benicio is Lawrence Talbot (I'm immediately calling bullshit...Talbot? He's clearly Puerto Rican), an Englishman who gained an American accent on the stage while becoming a popular actor (huh?), who returns home in search of his missing brother only to be bitten by the same presumed werewolf that offed brodre. The presuming transformation, emprisonment, escape, love, and fight scenes are all fairly rote, save a bit in a macabre sanitarium and some genuinely shocking and intense werewolf feasts that reminded me of the "Dinner is served" scene in From Dusk Till Dawn. The direction is all over the place, and the departure of original director Mark Romanek mere weeks before shooting is clearly evident, as paradoxes plague the movie's style like...a fucking plague. So much can't be said for the script, which is just...dead. The dialogue, characterizations, scenarios, and resolutions are all complete and utter dogshit, reeking of uninspired and uncreative people holding the pens (hint: probably not WGA members). But god, Rick Baker is really the fucking man; his wolfman design for Del Toro is easily his best work since Planet of the Apes. It's expressive, but that's not Benicio, that's a fucking monster, and a scary one to even look at. The film earned my respect every minute Baker's work was on display, but not much elsewhere.

Only for fans of Rick Baker and gory, expensive Gothic horror. Benicio, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving have underwritten roles not worth witnessing; Emily Blunt is, as her name implies, dead weight. Kind of a pointless film.