The Wolfman
Universal Pictures | Release Date: February 12, 2010 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
43
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 36 Critic Reviews
Positive:
8
Mixed:
19
Negative:
9
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax. Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Del Toro, with his melancholy-brute features, endows this raging beast with some of the ''Why me?'' poignance you may remember from Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in the original. Read full review
63
ObserverRex Reed
But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script, by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you!” Read full review
63
Orlando SentinelRoger Moore
The matter-of-fact way everybody involved faces this supernatural horror drains most of the chills right out of it. Read full review
63
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
The Wolfman avoids what must have been the temptation to update its famous story. It plants itself securely in period, with a great-looking production set in 1891. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy Burr
The movie is by no means good but it’s surprisingly enjoyable: a misty, moody Saturday-matinee monster-chiller-horror special. Read full review
63
PremiereJohn DeVore
Isn’t like a lot of modern horror movies. It’s not about torture, or dead children, or weepy vampires with great hair. It’s an attempt to reinvent the monster movie, which we're all about. It’s too bad it couldn’t have been contemporized. Period movies can so easily become parodies of portentousness, and that’s what happens with this one. Read full review
63
New York PostKyle Smith
As a spooky midnight movie, The Wolfman is worth curling up with. Read full review
60
Boxoffice MagazineRay Greene
Benicio Del Toro looks even more like Lon Chaney Sr. than Chaney Jr. did, and he’s a far better actor than the previous Wolf Man. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsJoe Neumaier
If you're going to pick the werewolf as your favorite monster, there's a lot to appreciate in the shaggy, imperfect but still fun new version of The Wolf Man. Read full review
50
Arizona RepublicBill Goodykoontz
The movie plays like a missed opportunity, with its by-the-numbers scares and a story that feels disjointed, hurried in some places, slow in others. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
This is fairly satisfying, particularly a ghoulish episode in a Victorian insane asylum. Read full review
50
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe Holleman
Falls into that middling ground of horror film: neither scary enough to be exciting nor campy enough to be amusing. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubKeith Phipps
A few stray livers and severed heads aside, this is a monster too polite for its own good. Read full review
50
USA TodayClaudia Puig
What emerges is a banal horror film and a tepid action-adventure. Read full review
50
NPRMark Jenkins
Unfortunately, brutality is about all this update of 1941's The Wolf Man can do well. Mutilations, decapitations and disembowelments are handled with aplomb in the first R-rated film from director Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Jurassic Park III). But everything that doesn't involve gore feels like an afterthought. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The root problem with The Wolfman is that it's a hybrid. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleAmy Biancolli
The movie's best special effect hands down is Anthony Hopkins as Talbot the Elder, who flounces around in a tiger stole and utters his lines with such a delicious madman twinkle you might want to snack on him yourself (ahhh-ROOooh). Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)James Adams
An ill-considered, utterly unnecessary remake of the 1941 pulp classic "The Wolf Man" starring Lon Chaney Jr. Read full review
50
SlateDana Stevens
Johnston understands everything about old-fashioned werewolf movies except why they were scary. Read full review
40
The Hollywood ReporterMichael Rechtshaffen
Not bad enough to be considered a camp, guilty pleasure, it's more of a dull, defanged dirge with the reliably intriguing Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins turning in oddly disaffected performances. Read full review
40
VarietyTodd McCarthy
The constant repetition of these shock tactics, in lieu of genuine suspense, makes The Wolfman feel cheap, despite the vast amounts obviously spent on Rick Heinrichs' opulent production design, the extensive visual effects, the more-than-effective special makeup effects, Milena Canonero's luxurious costumes, Danny Elfman's insistent score and the tony cast. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
There's plenty of doom, gloom, and outright despair on hand here but very little genuine human emotion. Read full review
40
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
In this shaggy-dog version the wolfman’s story is both gratuitously bloody and, finally, bloodless. Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesBetsy Sharkey
Here's the surprise of the new incarnation of The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro -- there isn't one. No bite either, or humor, or camp. Read full review
40
SalonStephanie Zacharek
The Wolfman isn't crazy enough to be fun or multilayered enough to be touching. It's impossible to have any real feeling for this anguished beastie. Read full review
40
EmpireHelen O'Hara
An uneven tone and the feeling of too many cooks mars the finished product, but there are moments of beauty and real terror. Read full review
38
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense. Read full review
38
Rolling StonePeter Travers
What have you done to The Wolfman, Hollywood? It’s got no kick to it. No fun either. And no real scares, which is more unforgivable. Read full review
38
Washington PostRick Warner
It's all too predictable and by the book. Even with a few plot twists that aren't in the original, I was hardly shocked or awed. While it's sleeker and more sophisticated than the Chaney version, this new Wolfman isn't any scarier. Read full review
38
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike Scott
Anthony Hopkins still does elegant menace better than anyone. Read full review
33
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
Deeply phony, strangely static, disengaged, flaccid and, quite often, silly, it’s a film that tries to bully you into emotions with flourishes of music, contorted camera angles, screams of special effects, smears of gore, and earnest close-ups of its woefully miscast star. Read full review
33
Christian Science MonitorAndy Klein
The Wolfman isn’t scary. In fact, it isn’t much of anything. Read full review
30
L.A. WeeklyErnest Hardy
A movie that’s full of sound, fury and unintentional camp -- and is still bafflingly inert. Read full review
25
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
Johnston fails to make a story set in 1891 England relevant to contemporary audiences. Read full review
20
Time OutKeith Uhlich
Speed can be a virtue, but there’s something extremely off-putting about the way The Wolfman, Universal’s latest horror classic redux, races through its opening scenes. Read full review
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