“It’s a love story between these two mean, really”, notes director Paul McGuigan.
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Apart from a few agreeably 1930s-style spooky moments in the lab, the film seems mainly to amuse itself coming up with ways to work in lines like, “It’s alive!” and “Yes, master” as it proceeds to an inevitable climax in a remote castle where “the new Prometheus”, as Victor calls his creation, comes disastrously to life amid thunder and lightning.
New adaptation of Frankenstein hits screens on December 3rd. Still, it’s better than last year’s I, Frankenstein.
Here, Radcliffe’s Igor is a hunchbacked circus freak with a brilliant scientific mind and a knack for medicine. Former “Downton Abbey” star Jessica Brown Findlay is strictly decoration as a trapeze artist beloved by Igor, but Andrew Scott (the smarmy C in “Spectre”) gets into a nice little groove as a policeman investigating the unusual doings over at the Frankenstein place.Radcliffe, once he gets straightened out, looks every inch the long-haired absinthe-sipping Victorian gentleman, but his character mostly stands aside while Victor gets the showier dialogue.McAvoy spews it out with uninhibited relish, and good for him; it’s the only way to play this kind of thing, as actors from Colin Clive to Gene Wilder have understood. The biggest issue is that when the monster does finally arrive, the script has robbed it of any mystery and provided too much motivation, backstory and identity. But Victor Frankenstein makes up for all of those, breathing new life into Mary Shelley’s classic tale of mortal man overreaching his bounds. Radcliffe is more subdued, but he also delivers the stronger performance and it would have been interesting to see a movie truly interested in exploring the warring aspects of his Igor’s character. This is just another copy of a copy, shambling about and looking for a reason to be that it never quite attains.
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Victor Frankenstein will be released on December 3rd 2015.
