Universal’s latest attempt to re-animate a long-dead franchise sticks pretty close to the 1941 original in many ways - though also including elements of the studio's earlier Werewolf of London - and retains basically the same outline for much of its length: Larry Talbot, hearing of the death of his brother, returns to his boyhood village in the hope of reconciliation with his estranged father, only to find that villagers are falling prey to some dreadful creature of the night. After an encounter with some gypsies – initially blamed for the killings – Talbot comes face to face with a werewolf. Although he survives the encounter, the lycanthropic curse is passed to him and he becomes the Wolf Man of the film’s title – awkward, when he’s fallen for comely antiques dealer Gwen Conliffe but his torment can only be ended by his death.

All these essential plot points are present in the new Wolfman – yes, the film-makers wanted to ‘honour’ the original, as they always say these days before transforming one of your favourite movies into cinematic KFC – but are given a number of tweaks and twists for this 21st century outing. For starters, the events are moved back from ‘present day’ rural Wales to a wildly fantasticated and over-art directed Victorian England of the kind we’re all too used to seeing in contemporary Hollywood films. Sir John now inhabits a crumbling and implausibly huge ancestral pile (Chatsworth House, with a lot of CGI work) outside a remote village called Blackmoor, while Gwen’s antique shop is moved from Wales to London – purely so the Wolfman can tear across the city’s rooftops in what is essentially a shot-for-shot knock-off of a sequence from the dreadful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in which Mr Hyde does exactly the same thing in Paris.

Similarly, the film indulges in its own bit of Wold-Newtonish intertextual play by introducing the character of Inspector Aberline of the Yard; fresh from investigating the Ripper murders, he’s sent from London to look into this latest spate of gruesome murders. It’s a reference that serves no purpose, just a winking gesture that the script does absolutely nothing with, even if Hugo Weaving does give the film’s best performance in his underwritten role.  

These, though, are minor tweaks, compared to the film’s big ‘twist’ – stop reading now if you don’t want to know.

Lawrence Talbot (Benecio Del Toro, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Lon Chaney Jnr from certain angles) is now a Shakespearean actor who’s made his name in the States, and his relationship with his old man (Anthony Hopkins) is not just frosty but positively dysfunctional; the film introduces, in flashback, a sort of primal scene in which the young Larry stumbles upon his father cradling his dead and blood-soaked mother in his arms. So far, so psychosexual, and such departures from Curt Siodmak’s original script seem acceptable enough as a way of drawing out some of the darker aspects of lycanthropic lore – sex as violent bestiality, desire as involuntary bloodlust – that have always haunted the screen werewolf mythos.

Trouble is, imputing any such motives to this screenplay soon seems like a misguided act of charity. What’s set up here is not so much a web of psychological and subtextual ‘readings’ of the legend to support Talbot’s transformation into a lupine killing machine but an entirely literal-minded plot device leading to the revelation that Anthony Hopkins is – yes, I’m sorry to have to tell you this – Daddy Werewolf. All so the film can climax in a scene of bludgeoning stupidity as furry father and son face off in the burning ancestral pile, two Alpha-males biffing away at one another like a pair of Mexican wrestlers. Hopkins, in (what I hope remains) a career-worst performance (his wandering accent doesn’t help), plays Sir John like a hairy Hannibal who revels in his lycanthropy the way Lector savoured his cannibalism. Del Toro’s Talbot jnr seems literally overpowered by this Oedipal scenario, cowed into delivering a performance that never comes to life or captures the pathos of his intolerable situation.

All of which serves to make something of a nonsense of the central drive of the werewolf mythos; if the legend’s power derives from its acknowledgement that human beings are (at the very least) dual creatures – the divine spark and the beast within – then the fundamental job of a werewolf movie is to dramatise this duality within a single figure. To reduce this most guilt-ridden of internal conflicts to a punch-up between good werewolf and bad werewolf is to rob it of much of its power.

Then again, one could interpret the film as attempting – in a sense – to question such bipolarity, asking instead whether the two extremes might not be points on a continuum of human behaviour: where does the man end and the beast begin? Perhaps, in this way, one could even read the film as a post-Christian exercise in moral relativism, as well as a deliberate shifting of the blame from original sin to those of the fathers. Unconsciously or not, then, this is arguably a Wolfman for our own morally uncertain times.

Werewolf fanciers will no doubt be wondering how well the film pulls off its creature. The combination of Rick Baker’s make-up – respectfully riffing on Jack Pierce’s iconic (but, let’s face it, silly) original – with some effective CGI makes the transformation scenes effective, though hardly groundbreaking. I was glad to see that Del Toro’s Wolfman, despite the bone-crunching changes he undergoes, is quite as good at keeping his clothes on as Chaney; but he’s defnitely a more powerful beast, muscular and fast, bearing down on his victims with the speed and heft of a ten-ton truck. And they die horribly – there’s a surprising amount of gore for a 15-certificate, a catalogue of eviscerations, decapitations and dismemberments that just a few years ago would have earned a serious intervention from the BBFC.

Most horrible of all, though, is Anthony Sher’s ludicrous turn as the ghastly Dr Hoenegger, crazed head of the Lambeth Asylum who oversees Talbot’s ‘treatment’; he’s got a German name, a funny Hitler accent, and even though he’s meant to be a psychiatrist his medical smock is always smeared with blood – would you trust him?

In the film’s best scene, a bound and gagged Talbot is wheeled into a lecture theatre on the night of the full moon so Hoenneger can confidently pontificate on the exclusively psychological nature of his illness to the assembled quacks. The results, though predictable, are satisfying.

I wish the same could be said for the film as a whole, but in its grim determination to make everything bigger, faster and louder this Wolfman loses any sense of tension or tragedy in a welter of shock-cuts and sound effects, failing to make us care, even momentarily, about its characters. Joe Dante’s 1981 The Howling was an object lesson in how to take a moribund genre staple and make it scary, funny and relevant to an entirely new era; in our current climate of ‘honouring’ the past while keeping one eye on the video game spin-off such an achievement seems nigh-on unthinkable.