Susan Granger’s review of “BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF” (Universal Focus)
This epic French fantasy-thriller combines the monster movie with martial-arts action as a Gallic legend comes to life on the screen. On the eve of the French Revolution, it seems a giant wolf-like creature was savagely terrorizing peasants, primarily women and children, in the rural southern region of Gevaudan – and the ensuing uproar was embarrassing to the 18th-century monarch, Louis XV. So he sent a renowned philosopher/naturalist, Gregoire de Fronsac (hunky Samuel Le Bihan), with his stoic Canadian-Iroquois blood brother (Hawaiian-born athlete Mark Dacascos) to the fog-shrouded countryside (that resembles “Sleepy Hollow”) to bring the rampaging beast down. Plus there’s a right-wing religious conspiracy, a kinky courtesan/spy (Monica Belluci), and a sneering villain (Vincent Cassel) who lusts for his winsome sister (Emilie Dequenne) who falls for Fronsac. Writer/director Christophe Gans and co-writer Stepane Cabel’s daring concept of updating historical drama, laced with superstition, has clearly been influenced by the canards and clichŽs of Hong Kong’s Samurai movies, Sergio Leone’s reworking of the Western genre, Hollywood costume dramas and werewolf stories, and the results – with credit to Dan Laustsen’s cinematography and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop – are staggeringly violent and overblown, particularly the evisceration sequences. And any resemblance to the “Beast of Gevaudan” folklore turns out to be purely coincidental. In French with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Brotherhood of the Wolf” is a visually stylish, supernatural 6 with its gory, grisly bite aimed particularly at a young adult audience. “Brotherhood” was such an enormous hit in France that it’s skipping the art-house route to prowl our mainstream multiplexes.
