monstrous monsters \/\/ dear hollywood

The Wolfman stars Benicio del Toro as a man who returns home to his father (Anthony Hopkins) and their vast English estate.  Unfortunately, the curse of the wolf runs in his family.  In Legion, Paul Bettany’s fallen angel tries to save a group of people from the coming apocalypse of angry angels and possessed humans.

If you’re planning on seeing either movie spoiler-free, don’t read on.  Go see what Chicken Flava is up to.

Dear Hollywood,

Here’s how you make a monster or creature: design a cool-looking fantastical beast, give it a set of attributes, let it run amok.  It’s simple to make a satisfying monster.

So why do you keep fucking it up?

This past week I went to two cineplex creature features: The Wolfman and Legion.  A rebooting of Universal’s venerable werewolf property and Paul Bettany fighting… angels.  Guess which one I had actual hopes for.

But no!  Not even movie-magic pedigree means anything!  Both films disrespect their respective monsters by not adhering to the simple formula present above.  What’s the point of doing a monster movie if you can’t do the monster part right?  As fun as it as watching a batshit bearded Anthony Hopkins torment Benicio del Toro, I laid my money down to see some werewolf furred fury.

The furry face of misused potential.

My beefs with Wolfman?  Let’s check the list.

Cool-looking beast?  It’s got that, easily.  The transformation scenes were good even, with bones contorting into shape accompanied by gross mashing sounds.  Wolfy looks good in 2010.  Sorry Lon Chaney Jr.

Coherent attributes?  Now this is the problem.  For the majority of the movie, the Wolfman is set up as a blind, raging killer.  Once a dude goes werewolf, he turns everyone he sees into a pulpy puddle of entrails.  It cannot discern friend from foe, child from adult, deer from human.  Die gypsies!  Die townspeople!  Anthony Hopkins’s (who plays the cursed father to Benicio’s cursed son) werewolf kills his ultra-beloved wife without recognizing her.  Then, decades later, he kills his other son.  Kill kill kill!

At first, once Benicio turns wolfy, he does the same.  Kill kill kill!  But once we move into the third act, his werewolf-self somehow starts to discern who to kill and who to let live for dramatic purposes.

After Benicio’s been captured and tortured in a sanitarium, the doctor trying to cure him wants to prove that this werewolf thing is really in the poor guy’s head.  So he invites all his colleagues to check out the alleged wolfman not turning wolf when the moon’s full.  A round of “let’s laugh at the lunatic.”

Oh, and the Scotland Yard detective that’s been hounding Benicio the whole movie is invited too.

Oh, and everyone’s locked in the observation auditorium.

So when Benicio goes wolf, I’m thinking, oh yes, total bloodbath.  But wolf-Benicio picks out the doctor and the guard who’ve been electrocuting/waterboarding/curing him, slaughters them, then JUMPS OUT THE WINDOW to cue a chase scene through old timey London so the detective can chase him on foot and shoot aimlessly at the rooftops.

So there’s a weird double fuck-up going on here.  The creature that formerly just ripped everyone to pieces decides to target the guys who’ve been torturing his human self.  This isn’t how the wolf’s been explained thus far.  Wolf-Hopkins killed half his own family!  But wolf-Benicio suddenly gets to pick and choose?

Okay.  But if he can pick and choose who to disembowel, why not chomp on the detective who put him in the sanitarium?  He’s RIGHT THERE!

Because it’s lazy storytelling.  The internal wolfman logic gets conveniently rearranged to cue up the next crowd-pleasing trope.  Get revenge on that shit-eating doctor!  Oh, chase scene between main characters!

Give me a break.  And I’m not even going to go into the scene where the two werewolves meet and decide to fight each other instead of going on a glorious super-rampage.  Or where Benicio’s dead brother’s fiancée is able to stop wolf-Benicio from killing her because human-Benicio “loves” her in the typically threadbare Hollywood way.

The monster logic’s been totally subverted.  What’s sadder than a subverted monster?

This:

nothing

There wasn’t even enough amokking.  Begone, love story.

Legion looked like a turdburger from the outset.  But I thought maybe the monsters could save it.  Ceiling-climbing possessed grannies?  Spider-legged ice cream men?  Count me in.

But the faults and holes in Legion are legion.  Some possessed people can skitter across the ceiling or grow giant limbs and gallop around.  But only when it makes for a cool fight scene.  Otherwise they just walk around and serve as cannon fodder for our well-armed heroes.  Learn from Day/Dawn/Night of the Dead.  Make your creatures consistent.  If there’s a reason why one has special powers, at least pretend there’s a reason for it.  (Even in the Lord of the Rings movies they made sure you knew which orcs had more badassery.)

But the most excremental misuse of a monster comes when a real, bad-ass angel descends to wipe out Paul Bettany’s little fight-for-the-future-of-humanity klatch.

The winged fury of misused potential.

In short order, we learn that this real angel can fly, is tremendously strong and fast, has mobile razor-sharp armored wings, and can survive all manner of beatings, stabbings, shootings, and propane gas explosions.  He also wields a giant mace.

His mission is to kill a new-born infant (the key to humanity’s future…but we’re not sure why/how) escaping the mayhem with the mother who just gave birth, a teenage girl, and a hillbilly.

So when the angel catches up to the car they’re traveling in, you’d expect he’d stomp those weaklings in about the time it takes to finish writing this sentence.

But instead he’s repelled by these two things: (1) a flaregun and (2) the hillbilly driving the car real fast then slamming on the brakes so the massive razor-winged angel just flies out through the windshield and disappears.  Without hurting anyone.

That’s it.  That’s all it takes to defeat a creature that’s been set up as the most dangerous thing on the planet.  A FLARE GUN and a hillbilly.

This is why some monster movies are classic (Aliens, Predator) and some are garbage (Wolfman, Legion).

The monster movie hinges on the monster’s abilities being consistent enough that we’re trying to figure out how to beat it along with the heroes.  If the monster’s attributes change just so the script can vomit up one passably entertaining moment after another, the whole thing collapses.  The Predator’s powers are meticulously set up so we can marvel at Arnold’s ingenuity when he defeats it.  Its actions relate to how the movie sets up its attributes and gadgets.  What it does jives with the movie’s internal logic.

When you disrespect your monsters and make them agents of the story instead of characters that operate with their own separate, coherent logic, you fill the film with a funk no amount of CGI can erase.

If I was that bad-ass angel, I would’ve just flown down to the car and decapitated everyone with my razor wings then punted the baby into orbit.  Mission accomplished.  Go angry God.

Seriously, a flare gun?

So, Hollywood, if you’re not going to do your monsters justice, then go make some mumblecore indie films instead.  At least I won’t be tempted to watch them.

Sincerely,

Tyler Re:

Photo credits: moviealert, moviefill

Tags: legion, the pink sheep of the family, the wolfman