One of the bigger issues in remaking classic films is that the filmmakers feel the need to trump the original film, so they needlessly pump the film with some sort of manufactured subtext, loud noises and lots of CG nonsense.
For Exhibit A, I give you "The Wolf Man," a puzzling train wreck of a film that is often nonsensical, other times unintentionally funny, but always haphazardly thrown together, a particularly bad sign given the film was delayed for nearly a year.
Benicio Del Toro dons Lon Chaney's classic makeup, though much of it has been replaced with CG theatrics, and not even the good ones. There are buckets of guts, though, though even a gorehound like myself can tell when it's being used cheaply.
Director Joe Johnston ("Jurassic Park III") takes a relatively simple story (man is bitten by wolf, becomes wolf at the full moon) and infuses it with daddy issues and cornball gore and manages to add absolutely no insight to the original.
The story, in a nutshell: Lawrence Talbot (Del Toro), a famous stage actor, returns home to his father's palatial estate after the mysterious death of his brother. He meets big bro's girl (Emily Blunt) (and before long is lusting for her himself), catches up with pops (Anthony Hopkins), and continues to mourn the death of his mother, whom he saw die in his father's arms as a child.
His brother was only the latest in a series of grisly deaths in the area that has the villagers in an uproar. Talbot suspects a creature, and sets out with some townsfolk to hunt it down. They find it, but not before it literally rips through the men and bites Talbot.
Soon, a Scotland Yard detective (Hugo Weaving) shows up, and stuff hits the proverbial fan.
The film is a mash of oddly disjointed sequences. At one point Talbot is inexplicably committed to an insane asylum and tortured, then breaks free. We hear exposition moments earlier that he had been there before, but why and for how long we don't know.
We also get a crazy dream sequence/hallucination that goes on way too long (and features a mystifying gratuitous side boob shot of Blunt), mad-scientist doctors, and abrupt personality shifts that would make a professional wrestler to cry foul.
There are gaping plot holes, contrivances and slasher-film conventions galore. Without giving too much away, we suspect from the start there's something sinister with the elder Talbot, and there are severely egregious changes in the wolf's behavior at a couple of key moments (it's unfortunate that I can't go into more detail, but revealing more would spoil the movie, and the movie itself did enough of that already).
Most of the scares take the loud music cue conventions to a new level, with I'd say a dozen or more dog/wolf growls/howls/barks with the volume turned way up, accompanied by a quick, out-of-nowhere appearance from a werewolf. It's the laziest and most annoying cover for a bad horror movie, and since most of the wolf scenes sacrifice real tension for "look at this" CG effects, that's all we have. Making things worse is we get a lot of them.
Of the principal cast, only Weaving seems to be having any fun. He flicks out his lines in that wonderfully droll, over-enunciated way only he can, and relishes any chance he has to show off his Lemmy-from-Motorhead biker 'stache.
Del Toro literally seems to be sleepwalking through his scenes, ambling about like he doesn't know what day it is, and even Hopkins flounders, playing Sir John Talbot in a far too understated way. His idea of appearing evil is showing his teeth, and it's almost hard to believe this was the same man who made Hannibal Lecter one of the creepiest villains of all time.
Saddest of all is that "The Wolf Man" could have easily been a remake worthy of the original given the talent involved. Instead, now all I'm left with is a sense of dread, not of werewolves, but that Joe Johnston is directing the film adaptation of another of my beloved childhood icons, Captain America.