Blake Lovell thinks taking his wife and young daughter to rural Oregon to pack up his dead father’s belongings is a good idea. It’s a break from their urban life, might help repair his fraying marriage and reconnect them all with nature. “It would be good for us,” he argues.
It will not, of course, because this is a Blumhouse movie called “Wolf Man.” It will not be good for Blake and it will not be good for the audience. That’s because this film is a terrible misfire using a classic movie monster poorly rebooted by the modern home of horror.
Slack when it should be terrifying, “Wolf Man” suffers from cheap sentimentality, laughably obvious script reveals, poor continuity and a creature that is less predatory than painful. Pity comes to mind.
Christopher Abbott stars as Blake, a father and husband whose own estranged dad was a tad unstable, constantly drilling in his son a survivalist ethic. “It’s not hard to die. It’s the easiest thing in the world,” his dad says. He being officially declared dead 30 years after he disappeared into the forest starts this sludgy movie off.
“The Invisible Man” writer-director Leigh Whannell — who co-wrote the story with Corbett Tuck — seems to be attempting a horror movie with his new message: Being overprotective can lead to your family being assaulted by a deranged manbeast. Wait, that can’t be right. Maybe it’s about inheritance? It’s all a little muddled.
A weird human-animal hybrid lurking in the Oregon wilderness — actually New Zealand pretending to be Oregon — kicks off what is supposed to be the scary part of this movie, but so much time is spent on the domestic drama set-up that the audience will be bored by the time the supposed thrill ride shows up. When it does, the filmmakers lean on creepy sounds way too much.
There’s a Wolf Man out there and he’s, well, underwhelming. He is largely unseen for most of the movie because seeing the monster is always a bad idea. At one, point, he attacks through the cabin’s doggie door, one of the most disappointing assaults on film.
Now infected inside their barricaded cabin, Blake goes through a body-horror transformation, which includes the sweats, enhanced hearing, uncontrolled peeing, teeth readjustment, mottled skin, being made mute and hair loss. That’s right, hair loss. This is the first Wolf Man movie that seems to endorse Rogaine.
His wife, played by Julia Garner, is left here to sniffle and shriek, going from life partner to potential dinner. That means a lot of running and panting with a flashlight in hand. Their daughter, played by Matilda Firth, earlier so precocious, now asks really stupid questions like “What’s happening?” and “What’s wrong with Daddy?”
So, outside the cabin lurks a Wolf Man. And inside is potentially another, but one still kind of trying to hold onto his humanity. “Mom, he wants this to be over,” the girl says of her dad-wolf. We know the feeling.
“Wolf Man,” a Universal Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated R for “bloody violent content, grisly images and some language.” Running time: 103 minutes. No stars out of four.
