The new Wolfman movie is a strange beast.  It's got one foot in homage to the Universal classic, and one foot in the world of modern, gruesome horror.  I appreciate the effort there and I enjoy seeing a werewolf who wears a shirt, vest, and slacks, but the tone is sometimes jarring.  The film is full of atmosphere and great shots of spooky, fog-drenched woods.  It has been made with a modern eye and a modern sensibility, but there are plenty of throw-back moments that are almost laughably corny.  It's like watching a modern NFL game where the players are wearing throwback jerseys, I guess.

A concept like the Wolfman can go one of two ways--it can be a serious meditation on the nature of man's struggle to overcome his baser, more violent instincts, or it can be a campy excuse to throw a guy in a suit and have him pop out from behind trees and howl at the moon.  This iteration of the movie leans more towards the latter, but it wants to be serious in places and those are the parts that worked the least for me.  I loved the man-in-a-suit werewolf, but I didn't care much for the backstory about the Wolfman's lineage.  I enjoyed the clever ways that the Wolfman was revealed in the woods, through flashes of light and swift-moving shadows, but I didn't care much for the hackneyed origin story involving a feral boy in India and gypsies.  It feels like there are large parts of the serious narrative that were cut from the film to keep it moving quickly, and if that is the case, I wish that they had cut more and just given us more of Benecio in make up slashing people to bits.

Some of the film's modern techniques don't really jive with the retro tone, either.  While the makeup is generally good but not at all convincing, the CGI transformation scenes are pretty bland.  It's a shame that the transformation scene in American Werewolf in Londonbecame such a notable FX gag, because every werewolf movie since then has felt the need to one-up the transformation.  Frankly, I think even showing the transformation is a disservice to the story.  The werewolf mythos is not about the act of turning into the beast, it's about what the person does when he is the beast, and when he is the man aware of the beast.  This is the same thing that propels Marvel Comics heroes like The Hulk and Wolverine.  Both of those characters struggle with a duality--with keeping their impulse towards destruction at bay--and actually watching the characters turn from 'normal' to inhuman isn't really the point.  The CGI in The Wolfman didn't look terrible, but it was clearly not practical and that pulled me out of the movie in a way that the practical FX never did.  The less said about the CGI gypsy bear and the Anthony Hopkins FX, the better.

I think I would have rather seen a complete re-imagining of the Wolfman story.  It seems like we've gotten a ton of experimental or at least interesting takes on vampires (Let the Right One In, Nadja, Daybreakers) and zombies (Fido, They Came Back, Shaun of the Dead) but the werewolf mythology hasn't evolved as much.  This version was fine but if I want a campy version of this story, I will just watch the original.  With all of the jump scares, the obvious Danny Elfman cues, the out-of-place dog and pup jokes, and the plot that's only half-baked, this version of the film doesn't offer anything new to the genre.  If The Wolfman is the best werewolf movie we've gotten recently, that's only because no one is really making any werewolf movies.  Maybe someone will be inspired by this one to take the idea in a bold new direction.