VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN. Directed by Paul McGuigan, with Daniel Radcliffe, James McAvoy, Jessica Brown Findlay, Andrew Scott and Freddie Fox.
Review: Sheri Linden
WHETHER you call it a hybrid, an origin story, a prequel, spinoff or “regeneration”, the stitched-together monster mashup that is Victor Frankenstein is in one sense a perfect specimen: It exemplifies the more-is-less school of moviemaking.
Retelling Mary Shelley’s horror classic from the viewpoint of Igor, the title character’s right-hand man, the film abounds in organs, limbs, entrails and bodily fluids, both human and non. Yet it never gets beneath the skin.
Whether they’re fans of the lead actors, the genre or the source novel, audiences for the long-delayed release will find all sorts of excess on display, but thrills in short supply. Director Paul McGuigan juggles action sequences, broody Gothic imagery and jokey meta-jabs in a vain attempt to raise the story from the dead. Stars James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe, though game, struggle to breathe life into the proceedings, their characters trapped in a no-man’s-land between Grand Guignol and camp.
The feature’s surfeit begins with an overload of introductory voiceover. Max Landis spells out everything that’s spellable in his screenplay. McAvoy’s Victor, all self-confident swagger, and Radcliffe’s recovering victim Igor, an innocent drawn as much from Mel Brooks as from Mary Shelley, are the yin-yang duo at the story’s centre. They meet at the circus, where production designer Eve Stewart, costume designer Jany Temime and cinematographer Fabian Wagner conjure a bright storybook look that contrasts strikingly with the surrounding city’s industrialised grit.
A hunchbacked clown in Pagliacci makeup, Igor is also the troupe’s self-taught doctor, but that doesn’t stop him from being abused onstage and off. “It’s hard to judge cruelty when you’ve never known kindness,” he tells the audience in the only memorable voiceover line. Victor’s instant recognition of the slightly younger man’s medical know-how is a strong starting point for Landis’ reimagining of the saga, although that kernel of mutual respect gets lost amid the numbing sensory onslaught.
Victor busts Igor out of his showbiz prison, an escape that unfolds in a choppy mix of slo-mo, knife-fight manoeuvres and conflagration, the first worrying sign that the movie is trying hard to be too many things. Back at Victor’s cavernous home/laboratory, in a scene that’s unforgettable for its sheer grossness, Victor relieves Igor of his misidentified spinal deformity by draining what turns out to be a massive abscess on his back.
Cleaned up and humanised, Igor is enlisted by Victor as a full-fledged partner in a secret project to reanimate the dead. Sulphates, metals and electrodes figure in the experiment, not to mention eyes suspended in gelatinous goo. At a Royal College of Medicine presentation of his first hodgepodge Prometheus, a homunculus built from multiple species – to McGuigan’s credit, the effect is practical, not digital – Victor attracts a crucial investor (Freddie Fox), who has a conveniently storm-swept Scottish castle to offer for the project’s final chapter. At the same time, Victor’s avid traffic in animal parts has attracted the attention of a dour Scotland Yard inspector (Andrew Scott).
McAvoy and Radcliffe are actors with charm to burn, but it’s only in briefly that their characterisations cut through the film’s pandemonium. McAvoy is brash and obsessed as Victor, who’s given to rants about in-vitro fertilisation that place him many dozens of decades ahead of his time, indifferent to the squirmy reactions of his posh dinner companions. Igor is a simpler reduction, little more than mounting reluctance to help his mentor. – Reuters. Hollywood Reporter