Brotherhood of the Wolf Tries Really, Really Hard, But It's Pretty Depressing

Right after leaving Brotherhood of the Wolf, the French chopsocky monster conspiracy epic, I called a friend and told him it was one of the worst movies I'd ever seen. In retrospect, that characterization wasn't quite fair. Brotherhood of the Wolf is trash, but at least it doesn't pretend to be urgent, relevant and emotionally truthful, like the gooey left-wing fantasy The Majestic or the context-free, casually racist military wank-fest Black Hawk Down. I should have said Brotherhood of the Wolf was one of the most depressing movies I'd ever seen?not because of its subject matter, which is pure comic book silliness, but because it was obviously made with a lot of passion and cleverness. Yet the result still suggests an answer to the question, "Can France out-trash Hollywood?"

The film's international cast includes brooding French hunks Samuel le Bihan and Vincent Cassel, American martial arts star Mark Dacascos and Italian sex bomb Monica Bellucci, and the behind-the-scenes roster includes a Danish cinematographer (Dan Lausten) and a Hong Kong editor (David Wu, who cut several John Woo pictures). You can almost picture the cast and crew striding out onstage at the yearly film exhibitors' convention ShoWest, to rapturous applause. The film's potluck mix of moods, styles and images reaches out to fans of every viable pop genre (ghost story, monster movie, martial arts, conspiracy thriller, softcore, romance, costume epic; the only thing missing is a hiphop soundtrack). It steals so blatantly from so many superior predecessors that I pictured Paul Thomas Anderson sitting there in the dark muttering, "All right, enough already."

The film's 41-year-old director, Christophe Gans, doesn't have anything in common with Quentin Tarantino style-wise, but if they happened to run into each other in a comic book shop one morning, they'd probably hang around shooting the breeze until the manager locked up. Like so many postboomer filmmakers, Gans seems to fetishize disreputable pop culture not for its creative oddness or its political significance, but just because it exists. He landed on Europe's cultural radar in his early 20s for publishing a fanzine devoted to kung fu, fantasy and science fiction movies, then distributed American genre films in France. Gans' first two directorial efforts were a version of H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon (the first installment in a projected trilogy) and a live-action version of the Japanese comic book Crying Freeman, starring Dacascos.

To paraphrase Terence Rafferty's review of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Gans is a filmmaker who chews with his mouth open; you can identify every piece of art that has fed his imagination. The plot jumps off from a real incident from 18th-century provincial France, when the so-called Beast of Gevuadan killed more than 100 people for reasons that still aren't known. The press notes promise "an enthralling tale?which might finally explain what actually happened over 200 years ago," but I see no reason for historians to bring a notepad. According to Gans, who cowrote the screenplay with Stephan Cabel, the beast was a razor-backed wolf demon (beautifully designed by Jim Henson's creature shop) that sprung from a combination of religious hysteria, sexual tension and political conspiracy. (In case you care about surprises, I won't say exactly how these three factors intersect.) Killing the beast requires the services of French adventurer Gregoire de Fronsac (le Behan), who just returned from the Americas, and his strong, silent Native American sidekick Mani (Dacascos), who can mystically communicate with the land and appears to have spent a lot of time in the 20th century studying with Bruce Lee. (Dacascos' big, serene eyes are the best special effect in the movie. He's a fascinating young actor who can probably do a lot more than kick people in the face; the way Hollywood works, he'll probably never be asked to prove it.)

As the tale unfolds over the course of 142 frenetic yet strangely monotonous minutes, Fronsac will court the virginal blonde noblewoman Marianne (Emilie Dequenne), enjoy trysts with the raven-haired mystical prostitute/witch Sylvia (Bellucci) and join forces with Mani to fend off wave after wave of fur-bedecked barbarians with the worst collection of beards and teeth this side of Braveheart. In contrast to Hong Kong kung fu pictures, or even a martial arts chimera like The Matrix, the quick-cut kickboxing sequences aren't welded to the core of the film's themes, so they feel cynical, arbitrary?a sop to current fashion. The sudden film-speed changes popularized by The Matrix and Madison Avenue (and deployed for no good reason in the pretend-serious war adventure Behind Enemy Lines) are already so dated that the fight scenes might as well have "1999" stamped in the corner of every frame.

The plot aspires to the status of religious/political parable and seems to take itself rather seriously, and the final act unfolds with an aura of self-satisfied brazenness. But I have yet to meet two people who've seen Wolf who can agree on what happened. There's scattered talk of the Catholic Church's resentment of French political autonomy, and some Crucible-style scenes where women are labeled witches for daring to behave in unfeminine ways. But these ideas are basically intellectual fig leaves covering the director's raging hard-on for genre flicks. The structure owes a lot to Jaws (and the opening monster attack is an obvious homage) but there's no Spielbergian control over the images; the widescreen photography has no sense of spatial tension, and the editing is the usual chop-chop nonsense. I don't doubt that Wolf was made with love?every creative person believes in his own sincerity?but the result feels less like a personal act of expression than a directorial debut by a well-connected, extremely ambitious producer. If you showed the last four reels out of order I doubt it would make much difference, as long as the projectionist remembered to crank up the volume.

French director Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element were criticized for whoring European cinema to Hollywood; the global ambitions of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with their comic book visuals, videogame acrobatics and nods to Japanimation and chopsocky, were noted in many a negative review. But whatever you think of those films (I despised the first three and adored the last two), they at least felt like stylistically unified efforts; in their own overscaled, flamboyant ways, they felt personal. Wolf feels as personal as a marketing memo; it's one of those films that mistake multiple endings for giving the audience its money's worth, and it bounces from genre to genre so inelegantly that at times I felt I was skipping between five different movies on cable late at night. It could have been a video game or a syndicated action series, and perhaps it will be. In a time when sensationalism and hype trump eccentricity and craft, it has all the earmarks of a surefire smash?a synthetic beast, fated to devour the world.