Oh, it’s a howler.

Like a lot of members of a couple, the Hallmark holiday that occurred this past weekend was an excuse to venture into a movie theater. While there were potential horrors aplenty waiting to be strung up and projected at our local multiplex, my valentine is less inclined towards movies that try desperately to get your heart beating more quickly, and more towards those drenched in the stuff that organ pumps. So while tens of millions of American dollars went towards Love(Actually) American Style, we bolstered the box office tally of Universal’s lost-gestating remake of the 1941 film The Wolf Man, its titled freshly tightened up to The Wolfman. We were still in the opening minutes when my moviegoing companion turned and whispered, “How can a movie be so bad so quickly?”

As usual, she was right. Under the direction of Joe Johnston, this monster announces itself as a woefully ungainly creature from the first moments of ponderous exposition. Working with a screenplay credited to Andrew Kevin Walker (who wants you to know that he wrote Seven, but more relevantly wrote Sleepy Hollow) and David Self (who wants you to know that he wrote Road to Perdition but more relevantly wrote The Haunting), Johnston tries to build up the inner psychologies of his characters with some melodramatic familial nonsense that he clearly can’t wait to race past. The film pulls off the odd trick of being impatient and painfully sluggish.

Casting Benicio Del Toro as the title terror initially seemed inspired, if only because his tendency towards barely discernible mumbling that could reasonably be mistaken for canine growls. In practice he just comes across as bored, entirely disengaged from the grim proceedings swirling around him. You’d think someone who has to mark off upcoming lupine transformations on his calendars might have some weight hanging on him because of it, a hint of anguish or dread. Del Toro instead typically looks no more troubled than, well, than an actor who finds himself stuck in a bad, demeaning job. At least that attitude is in line with most of his fellow actors. Anthony Hopkins operates in a mode of blithe distraction that’s practically become his trademark over the course of the past ten years. Emily Blunt merely seems stranded, biding time with pretty simpering until someone shows up with a character for her to play. Among the major players, only Hugo Weaving play his character, an inspector looking into the gruesome murders taking place on misty, moonlit nights, with an amount of notable energy, perhaps because he’s the one one will benefit most if the dangling promise of a sequel is fulfilled.

Perhaps the only proper motivation left for seeing The Wolfman is to examine the handiwork of Rick Baker, crafting a man-to-wolf transformation nearly thirty years after his pioneering effort on An American in Werewolf made him Hollywood’s most famous makeup artist. It mostly serves as a reminder of the remarkable nature of that original work since three decades of technological advances have led to something only marginally more impressive than what won him the first of his six Oscars. It’s at least impressive that the filmmakers eschew the current trend of paring back every conceivable film to a box office friendly PG-13 in favor of making a film that’s as bloody and violent as a film about a marauding beast should be. It’s somehow nice to know that some set dressers needed to take time to consider exactly where the entrails should be placed on the set.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)