Victor Frankenstein

There are certain stories that exist within the sphere of public consciousness. Whether they come from Aesop or a novel, they have transcended their origins and become a part of culture's shared mythology. These fables persist because they resonate on some basic level with the anxieties inherent to the human condition and are constantly reinterpreted in order to extract some new meaning from them.

Enter Victor Frankenstein, the latest in this longstanding practice of re-evaluation. The film takes the Frankenstein mythos, immortalized by James Whale's 1931 classic, and redefines it, seemingly with an aim to shift the focus from the monster to the man and explore the psychology behind his dogged desire to create life from death. In theory, this could serve as a deep and fascinating basis of a film about madness and desire; instead, what we have is a thoroughly mediocre and probably unnecessary exploitation of a recognizable brand.

The story is told through the perspective of Igor (Daniel Radcliffe), who, at the start of the film, is a mistreated circus clown who has an instinctual knowledge of anatomy. This catches the attention of a young Victor Frankenstein (James McAvoy), at this point still a medical student, who frees him and takes him back to his London loft, employing him as his assistant in the quest for the most significant scientific breakthrough to be known by mankind: reanimation.

Adamantly opposed to this is Inspector Turpin (Andrew Scott), who has his suspicions of Frankenstein's nefarious doings and finds reanimation an affront to God, and doggedly tries to put a stop to them, more out of a sense of religious duty than for the public good.

At times, Victor Frankenstein is a reasonably entertaining big-budget blockbuster. And in that sense, it more or less succeeds. It's not the best piece of entertainment ever made, but it moves quickly and has a couple of well-executed set pieces. However, at its heart, it's a movie about characters and relationships -- the relationship between Victor and Igor, between science and religion, between grief and madness. It is in the exploration of these relationships, however, where the film falters, and is what proves to be its downfall, torpedoing much of the good will established by its devotion to bombast.

The film postures as a study on character and morality, delving into the reason behind Victor's unwavering desire to create life from death, which very often borders on madness. While Igor is technically the protagonist of the film, he, for the most part, is just the audience's window into this world, the means through which the character of Frankenstein and how he interprets the world around him is examined.

One of the aspects inherent to the Frankenstein myth is the muddled ethics of reversing the natural order, which inevitably leads to a question of religion: What does it say about the nature and existence of a God if a creature can be brought back from the afterlife by man? Victor Frankenstein touches on this idea. But that's all it does, which is emblematic of the film's greatest problem: a complete lack of depth.

This is a film of broad strokes, the very idea of subtlety unknown to it. It attempts to give a sense of weight to the characters and their actions, but the psychological profiling here comes across as cliche and insincere. Instead of making a genuine effort to create characters who feel real, it merely feels as though the requisite boxes were ticked when filling out the template of a three-dimensional personality. Instead of stirring up a sense of empathy in the audience, it just reads as trite.

There's a continual and frequent shift between the bombastic and the contemplative in a way that seems less like Tarantino-esque genre blending and more like creative indecision, leading to a confusing and bizarrely uneven tone as it moves from comedy and horror to existential pontificating. There isn't so much a synthesis of the parts making up the film as there are a bunch of parts all clanking together, never quite fitting together.

Adding to this tonal dissonance are the performances. Radcliffe and Jessica Brown Findlay (playing Igor's designated love interest) give their characters some sense of nuance (although this is perhaps the gift of underwritten characters, lending a certain freedom of interpretation). The rest of the cast, however, play only their primary character trait and play it up hard, with some real Al Pacino levels of scenery chewing, especially on the part of McAvoy, who gives an incredible display of camp. In fact, camp permeates the entire production, in a way that could just as easily be intentional as not.

For all its faults, however, Victor Frankenstein can occasionally be fun thanks to a speedy pace and great production design (and the acting, although for different reasons), although it never rises above the level of boilerplate. While it attempts to present its source material in a new light, the film lacks a feeling of necessity, only utilizing its inspiration as brand recognition. Which, in Hollywood's current climate, is necessity enough.

MovieStyle on 11/27/2015