D-

Anyone expecting this remake to exhibit the atmosphere and elegance of the 1941 “Wolf Man,” the pinnacle in the otherwise undistinguished directorial career of George Waggner (a purveyor of aggressively B movies who wound up helming numerous episodes of the campy “Batman” TV series) is going to be sorely disappointed. “The Wolfman,” as Jim Johnston’s picture has been ever so slightly redubbed, is a torpid retelling of the classic lyncanthrophy story, both bloated and constricted, mostly glum but punctuated with nasty, intrusive humor, and more interested in décor and makeup than genuine style.

It would probably have been impossible merely to follow Curt Siodmak’s original script, which would be much too slow and straightforward to suit a big Hollywood horror-action movie of today (that was the case with “The Mummy,” too), but the alterations made by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self are almost gratuitously wrongheaded. Lawrence Talbot, the son who simply returns to the family estate to comfort his father after the death of his brother in the 1941 film, has become a famous American actor (a fact that stretches credulity, given that he’s played by Benicio Del Toro) long estranged from his father—the cause being that Sir John (Anthony Hopkins) committed young Lawrence to an insane asylum after the boy went berserk at his beloved mother’s gruesome demise; and Lawrence never forgave him for it. He’s summoned back by his brother’s fiancee Gwen (Emily Blunt) after her betrothed, his brother, disappears. But by the time Lawrence gets there, however, his brother’s body has been found, gruesomely ripped up, and the villagers—led by a fanatical preacher (the fulminating Roger Frost), of course—are being whipped into a frenzy against a group of gypsies who are camped nearby. Eventually it becomes clear that the gypsy’s dancing bear isn’t responsible; rather it’s a horrible wolf-like creature that disembowels people on its nighttime rampages and nips Lawrence when he tries to stop it.

From here the script goes pretty much bonkers. Sir John proves not to be the concerned, loving parent that he was in the original, but a man with an agenda of his own—and also with a devoted Sikh servant named Singh. A Scotland Yard Inspector shows up to investigate, and it turns out to be none other than Frederick George Abbeline (Hugo Weaving), a historical figure who, one character helpfully informs us, previously worked on the Jack the Ripper case (those murders occurred in 1888, while this story is set in 1891). After much mayhem poor Lawrence is carted back to the London asylum where his old doctor, Hoenneger (Antony Sher), employs brutal therapeutic methods to cure him of his supposed delusions—which of course leads to the revelation of Sir John’s plans and a big sequence involving mass slaughter and rooftop chases in the city. The last act returns us to Talbot Manor and a long, tedious, badly staged fight between two snarling werewolves as the house burns down around them in good old Gothic style.

All this added incident expands the narrative substantially but doesn’t improve it a bit. And it has the regrettable result of destroying whatever mood the picture has managed to create by inviting Hopkins to ham it up mercilessly while Del Toro is trying to maintain a solemn melodramatic pose—the older man’s smirking turn resembles nothing less than his Hannibal Lecter gone to seed, and a moment in which he abruptly switches to an Irish accent has more of vaudeville the Universal horror to it. As for the rest of the cast, Weaving is intense but uninteresting, Blunt less intense but no more interesting, and Sher and Fisk so cartoonishly over-the-top that they seem to have wandered in from Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein.” As for Geraldine Chaplin as Maleva, the old gypsy woman who mouths the famous ditty about wolf bane, she can’t hold a candle to the incomparable Maria Ouspenskaya.

Of course “The Wolfman” is leagues ahead of the 1941 picture in terms of transformation effects, but by now we’ve seen this stuff before on numerous occasions, and it has little impact. For the most part the picture relies on tired devices—sudden leaps from off-screen, loud noises and musical cues, and abundant gore (including a decapitation) to make its points, but the impact is slight. One can, however, praise the production design by Rick Heinrichs and art direction supervised by Andy Nicholson, even if Talbot Manor looks like the biggest, dankest building in England. Danny Elfman’s score is unusually ordinary coming from him—but then this footage could hardly have inspired him much.

Among the attempts to raise the old Universal monster classics from the dead, this one resembles Waggner’s film less than it does a complete washout like Steven Sommers’ 2004 “Van Helsing,” the nadir of the genre. It’s not quite as bad, but it comes perilously close. Check out the 1941 film instead—not just Waggner’s best work but one of Lon Chaney Jr’s finest performances too, and with great support from Ouspenskaya, Claude Rains as a very different daddy from Hopkins, and even Bela Lugosi (and really stylish camerawork from Joseph Valentine and a classic score by Hans Salter and Frank Skinner). It’s creaky in places, of course, but those creaks are far preferable to this movie’s turgid emptiness.