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Wolfman, The

EMAILPRINTUniversal Pictures

Wolfman, The reviews
43
4.6 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 36 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 50 votes
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Horror  |  Suspense/Thriller

Written by: Andrew Kevin Walker
David Self

Directed by: Joe Johnston

Release Date:
Theatrical: February 12, 2010

Running Time: minutes, Color

Origin: UK | USA

Summary

RATING: R for bloody horror, violence and gore

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving, and Art Malik

Inspired by the classic Universal film that launched a legacy of horror, The Wolfman brings the myth of a cursed man back to its iconic origins. Lawrence Talbot is a haunted nobleman lured back to his family estate after his brother vanishes. Reunited with his estranged father, Talbot sets out to find his brother... and discovers a horrifying destiny for himself. (Universal Pictures)

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

75

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax.

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75

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Del Toro, with his melancholy-brute features, endows this raging beast with some of the ''Why me?'' poignance you may remember from Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in the original.

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63

New York Post Kyle Smith

As a spooky midnight movie, The Wolfman is worth curling up with.

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63

Premiere John DeVore

Isn’t like a lot of modern horror movies. It’s not about torture, or dead children, or weepy vampires with great hair. It’s an attempt to reinvent the monster movie, which we're all about. It’s too bad it couldn’t have been contemporized. Period movies can so easily become parodies of portentousness, and that’s what happens with this one.

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63

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The movie is by no means good but it’s surprisingly enjoyable: a misty, moody Saturday-matinee monster-chiller-horror special.

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63

Orlando Sentinel Roger Moore

The matter-of-fact way everybody involved faces this supernatural horror drains most of the chills right out of it.

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63

New York Observer Rex Reed

But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script, by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you!”

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63

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The Wolfman avoids what must have been the temptation to update its famous story. It plants itself securely in period, with a great-looking production set in 1891.

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60

Boxoffice Magazine Ray Greene

Benicio Del Toro looks even more like Lon Chaney Sr. than Chaney Jr. did, and he’s a far better actor than the previous Wolf Man.

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60

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

If you're going to pick the werewolf as your favorite monster, there's a lot to appreciate in the shaggy, imperfect but still fun new version of The Wolf Man.

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50

USA Today Claudia Puig

What emerges is a banal horror film and a tepid action-adventure.

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50

NPR Mark Jenkins

Unfortunately, brutality is about all this update of 1941's The Wolf Man can do well. Mutilations, decapitations and disembowelments are handled with aplomb in the first R-rated film from director Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III). But everything that doesn't involve gore feels like an afterthought.

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50

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The root problem with The Wolfman is that it's a hybrid.

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50

San Francisco Chronicle Amy Biancolli

The movie's best special effect hands down is Anthony Hopkins as Talbot the Elder, who flounces around in a tiger stole and utters his lines with such a delicious madman twinkle you might want to snack on him yourself (ahhh-ROOooh).

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50

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) James Adams

An ill-considered, utterly unnecessary remake of the 1941 pulp classic "The Wolf Man" starring Lon Chaney Jr.

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50

Slate Dana Stevens

Johnston understands everything about old-fashioned werewolf movies except why they were scary.

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50

Arizona Republic Bill Goodykoontz

The movie plays like a missed opportunity, with its by-the-numbers scares and a story that feels disjointed, hurried in some places, slow in others.

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50

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

This is fairly satisfying, particularly a ghoulish episode in a Victorian insane asylum.

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50

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Holleman

Falls into that middling ground of horror film: neither scary enough to be exciting nor campy enough to be amusing.

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50

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

A few stray livers and severed heads aside, this is a monster too polite for its own good.

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40

The New York Times A.O. Scott

In this shaggy-dog version the wolfman’s story is both gratuitously bloody and, finally, bloodless.

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40

Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

Here's the surprise of the new incarnation of The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro -- there isn't one. No bite either, or humor, or camp.

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40

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

Not bad enough to be considered a camp, guilty pleasure, it's more of a dull, defanged dirge with the reliably intriguing Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins turning in oddly disaffected performances.

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40

Variety Todd McCarthy

The constant repetition of these shock tactics, in lieu of genuine suspense, makes The Wolfman feel cheap, despite the vast amounts obviously spent on Rick Heinrichs' opulent production design, the extensive visual effects, the more-than-effective special makeup effects, Milena Canonero's luxurious costumes, Danny Elfman's insistent score and the tony cast.

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40

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

There's plenty of doom, gloom, and outright despair on hand here but very little genuine human emotion.

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40

Empire Helen O'Hara

An uneven tone and the feeling of too many cooks mars the finished product, but there are moments of beauty and real terror.

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40

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

The Wolfman isn't crazy enough to be fun or multilayered enough to be touching. It's impossible to have any real feeling for this anguished beastie.

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38

Washington Post Rick Warner

It's all too predictable and by the book. Even with a few plot twists that aren't in the original, I was hardly shocked or awed. While it's sleeker and more sophisticated than the Chaney version, this new Wolfman isn't any scarier.

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38

New Orleans Times-Picayune Mike Scott

Anthony Hopkins still does elegant menace better than anyone.

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38

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

What have you done to The Wolfman, Hollywood? It’s got no kick to it. No fun either. And no real scares, which is more unforgivable.

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38

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.

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33

Christian Science Monitor Andy Klein

The Wolfman isn’t scary. In fact, it isn’t much of anything.

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33

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star.

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30

LA Weekly Ernest Hardy

A movie that’s full of sound, fury and unintentional camp -- and is still bafflingly inert.

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25

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Johnston fails to make a story set in 1891 England relevant to contemporary audiences.

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20

Time Out New York Keith Uhlich

Speed can be a virtue, but there’s something extremely off-putting about the way The Wolfman, Universal’s latest horror classic redux, races through its opening scenes.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 4.6 (out of 10) based on 50 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Joseph A gave it a7:
We really enjoyed; great, classic type monster movie.

Scott N gave it a7:
Not nearly as bad as the reviews give it credit for. Despite the accusations of this film being "boring", I never got bored with it. The story didn't move along at a real fast pace, but enough where you aren't looking at your watch and wishing something would just happen already. Great atmosphere and eeriness, as you would expect from a period horror film, espeically a werewolf flick. So-so acting for the most part IMO, and very serious. The werewolf looked very cool, although there are times when I wish Hollywood would just do away with the use of CGI, because they never can make the animations look real, like when the werewolf is jumping around from building to building. It just looks fake. Not a spectacular film by any stretch, but certainly watchable and I will probably buy it when it comes out on DVD/BluRay. If cheesy, campy humor splattered with lots of gratuitous gore is what you want in a horror movie, you will be disappointed. But if you want atmosphere, darkness, and still some gore, I think you will find that the Wolfman delivers.

David L gave it an8:
When i heard about another wolfman/lycan movie, didn't got my attention. But because there was nothing more interesting in the movies the Saturday, i give it a try, and i really like it, never thought the wolfman wold be like the 50´s but no problem for me, and never got bored. Need to try this movie

A. Hurrell gave it a10:
I actually really enjoyed this film, typically I don't like the wolf movies, there always so lame with their fake looking wolfmen. This movie held my interest throughout,the computer graphics helped a lot. It was very gory, and dark, I love the period in which they chose. It had a pretty cool ending too.

Andrew k gave it a6:
I give this a 6, very reluctantly, but because I felt it somehow deserved it. It was not "good", but it was so without being horribly bad. The only movie I have seen that received a 0 on my scale is "Zombie Nation" and if I could give it a - 5 I would, but that isn't how the scale works. 0 is the worst I can possibly imagine and compared to that, Wolfman is a 6, possibly a 5. Oddly enough, I agree with Joe J. on every good and bad movie he mentioned. The Shining, Lawrence of Arabia, and There Will be Blood are some of my favorite movies and if I could give them 20 I would, but again, not how this works. Anthony Hopkins' acting was surprisingly terrible in this movie, and Del Toro's accent was pretty horrid. If you love old fashioned Horror movies that aren't as low brow as some of today's garbage, I recommend this. If you are looking for a meaningful, delightful piece of cinema, I do not recommend this movie.

Cesar Baptista gave it a10:
I really can't believe how poorly this movie has been received. To me it bridges the divide between the pulpy golden age of horror movies and the current CGI action movie excess. If you can buy into the casting of Del Toro as Hopkins son in a period picture set in Victorian England then you might just enjoy two pretty good if effortless performances. Excellent pacing. I thought it was pretty baller. So there.

Keaton J gave it a4:
Too much CGI, not enough scares, and not enough romantic development between Benicio and Blunt. I was disappointed.

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