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. Lawrence Talbot's childhood ended the night his mother died. After he left the sleepy Victorian hamlet of Blackmoor, he spent decades recovering and trying to forget. But when his brother's fiancée, Gwen Conliffe, tracks him down to help find her missing love, Talbot returns home to join the search. He learns that something with brute strength and insatiable bloodlust has been killing the villagers, and that a suspicious Scotland Yard inspector named Aberline has come to investigate. As he pieces together the gory puzzle, he hears of an ancient curse that turns the afflicted into werewolves when the moon is full. Now, if he has any chance at ending the slaughter and protecting the woman he has grown to love, Talbot must destroy the vicious creature in the woods surrounding Blackmoor. But as he hunts for the nightmarish beast, a simple man with a tortured past will uncover a primal side to himself...one he never imagined existed. Joe Johnston ("Jurassic Park III") directs "The Wolfman," and six-time Oscar-winning special effects artist Rick Baker brings his design and makeup talents to transform Del Toro into the fearsome title character. - skip ad - Genres: Action/Adventure, Suspense/Horror and Remake Running Time: 2 hrs. 5 min. Release Date: February 12th, 2010 (wide) MPAA Rating: R for bloody horror, violence and gore. Distributor: Universal Pictures Cast And Credits Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving Directed by: Joe Johnston Produced by: Bill Carraro, Andrew Z. Davis, Jon Mone, Ryan Kavanaugh, Benicio Del Toro, Scott Stuber, Rick Yorn, Sean Daniel, Stratton Leopold

The title character in “The Wolfman,” an English squire turned actor turned howling, moonstruck lycanthrope, suffers from a vexing identity crisis, and so does the movie. Lawrence Talbot, the hairy hero broodingly played by Benicio Del Toro, is torn between his human and his bestial impulses, and this new version of the 1941 creature-feature classic struggles to stay true to its pulpy B-movie roots while fulfilling the commercial imperatives of a modern, large-scale commercial entertainment.

The wolfman’s own body is the site of this struggle. When Mr. Del Toro is shown, in close-up, decked out in furry masks and Rick Baker’s makeup effects, a hint of old-fashioned, handmade horror style creeps into the film. The pickled Victorian production design (by Rick Heinrichs) and the smoky cinematography (by Shelly Johnson) cast an appropriately sinister pall, enhanced by the growling and muttering of Anthony Hopkins, who plays Lawrence’s shambling nutcase of a father.

But when the computer-generated monstrosities take over, much of the Gothic fun leaks out of the picture, which has already nearly drowned in viscera and gore. The implied violence of the original gives way to a literal-minded bloodbath, with severed heads and limbs and lingering attention to the effects of lupine claws and teeth on human flesh. The climactic showdown resembles an extreme-fighting cage match conducted by a pair of rabid Wookies. Like much else in “The Wolfman,” this scene is more likely to make you howl with laughter than whimper in fright. Which would be fine if you could convince yourself that laughter was the intended response.

Mr. Hopkins, indulging a time-honored prerogative granted to slumming British actors, allows himself an occasional twinkle of amusement as he delivers fatherly advice, the gruesome import of which Lawrence will take much too long to figure out. But Mr. Del Toro broods and shivers in such earnest that you have no choice but to take him seriously. And Emily Blunt, as Gwen, the bereaved fiancée of Lawrence’s poor, disemboweled brother, Ben (Simon Merrells), widens her eyes and sets her lower lip to trembling with impeccable refinement just when a jolt of campy, melodramatic excess is most needed.

The director, Joe Johnston (“Jumanji,” “Jurassic Park III”), cannot seem to find the tone that would make “The Wolfman” work. The story is simple enough and should be foolproof. After Ben’s death, Lawrence returns home from a long exile, mostly in America, to his windswept hometown, Blackmoor, in the North of England. There he exchanges cryptic unpleasantries with his dad and makes sad eyes at Gwen. Meanwhile a diabolical predator is on the prowl. The residents of Blackmoor are terrified and blame the local Gypsies. And then the Gypsy encampment is set upon by the vicious, unseen (and therefore still scary) marauder.

During that rampage Lawrence sustains a nasty bite. Thereafter, every time the moon is full, he is transformed into a wolf in gentleman’s clothing. Thanks to an officious Scotland Yard inspector (Hugo Weaving), Lawrence is shipped off to a nasty asylum where, in the film’s only truly memorable sequence, he brutally debunks a doctor’s attempt to prove that werewolfism is a psychological delusion.

Gwen appears to reach a similar conclusion by combing through old books in the 19th-century equivalent of a Google search. If Lawrence’s condition is real, she reasons, then maybe “magic is real, and God is real.”

I can’t vouch for her theology, but “The Wolfman” spins in agnostic limbo, neither fantastical enough to be thrilling nor realistic enough to be genuinely disturbing. The aural and visual trappings of horror are there — in Danny Elfman’s throbbing, stabbing score and in a sound design replete with growls, howls, creaks and shrieks — but the dread never quite takes hold. Nor does the passion between Gwen and Lawrence that would have given this movie the frisson of romantic longing that seems to be a requirement for any respectable, commercially ambitious monster movie in the age of “Twilight.”

And it is hard to shake the suspicion that this “Wolfman” is haunted, above all, by those teenage vampires, who generate such frenzy (and such profit) from their sexless passions. If Lawrence Talbot had only stayed in America, he could have joined Team Jacob, stripped off his shirt and found some solace for his divided soul. In the “Twilight” world his predicament —animal hunger in perpetual conflict with human feeling — might have made a little more sense. But in this shaggy-dog version the wolfman’s story is both gratuitously bloody and, finally, bloodless.