Wolfman, The (2010)
When her fiancé goes missing, Gwen Conliffe asks Lawrence Talbot to come back to the home he’s left years ago and help search for his brother. Once arrived, Lawrence gets to hear that the mutilated body of his brother has been found. Determined to find out who killed his brother, Lawrence decides to stay home with his estranges father who had sent him to an insane asylum after his mother died when he was a kid.
He hears a viscious bloodthirsty animal has been killing villagers but when one night he gets to face the animal himself and survives, he starts to realise his future has changed forever.
Sound and Vision:
Most of the scenes we get to see in this Blu-ray release are spot-on gorgious stuff with great contrast, plenty of detail and overall great quality. Here and there the image loses a bit of focus and darks can get a bit mucky, but that may be intentional as it adds to the atmosphere.
We get a near-reference DTS track that uses all channels very intensely for Danny Elflman’s music score while dialogues are well-positioned with plenty of use of the surround channels for positioning when characters are placed outside the front center. The only thing we can see as a minor downpoint is that at times when the action pops up with as result that the volume tends to suddenly crank up with a loss of clarity. Not that this is much of an issue, but still.
Extras:
– Digital Copy of the original The Wolf Man from 1941
– 2 versions (original theatrical version and extended director’s cut) of the movie
– Deleted and extended scenes
– Alternative endings
– Return of ‘The Wolfman’
- The Beast Maker
– Transformation Secrets
– The Wolfman Unleashed
A very nice package of extras with especially the original 1941 movie (digital copy) and the director’s cut standing out. Unfortunately the digital copy of the original is only valid until end of this year so a seperate disc would have been preferred.
Conclusion:
The Wolfman is a remake of the 1941 classic directed by George Waggner and didn’t have an easy time getting completed. Joe Johnston (Jumanji) got the lead after Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) decided to leave the production and the studio requested several re-shoots and further editing which resulted in a two year delay of release. The end result is a pretty decent movie that unfortunately does have its flaws. The makers wanted to add so many things to the story that the pace is quite slow and the cast doesn’t seem to really manage getting into their character. This makes that Hopkins and Del Toro tend to seem overly depressed characters while Emily Blunt does little more than play the scared love interest and Hugo Weaving doesn’t go beyond the typical portraying of the standard Scotland Yard inspector.
The extended version adds 17 minutes to the theatrical cut and this results in some additional depth to the storyline. As such we preferred this one.
The release on Blu-ray comes with great image and sound quality and a nice package of extras so we can only conclude that Universal did a good job in the technical department. If they would have left the makers alone a bit more and wouldn’t have requested constant re-shoots and re-editing we might have had a terrific movie as well. As it is now, The Wolf Man is one of the better classic remakes of recent, but not fantastic.
7.0