[yasr_overall_rating]
Told from Igor’s perspective, we see the troubled young assistant’s dark origins, his redemptive friendship with the young medical student Viktor Von Frankenstein, and become eyewitnesses to the emergence of how Frankenstein became the man – and the legend – we know today.
I won’t fault “Victor Frankenstein” for deviating from its source material. The 1931 release of “Frankenstein” was wildly different from the novel, and its sequel, “Bride of Frankenstein,” didn’t bother getting any closer. While both films basically disregarded the book’s plot, they each understood how to get the most out of its monster – as a concept, and as a character. “Victor Frankenstein” is so bogged down by derivative plot points and flashy-but-inconsequential action sequences that it barely manages to incorporate the monster at all.
The film’s ostensible twist on the Mary Shelley tale is that it’s told from the perspective of Igor, Frankenstein’s assistant. This Igor (played by Daniel Radcliffe) differs from previous versions by not being a true hunchback, and by possessing at least as much medical knowledge as Frankenstein himself. (He differs from the character in the original novel by existing at all – there wasn’t a hunched lab assistant in Shelley’s book, and the name Igor wasn’t used until “Son of Frankenstein” in 1939, where it was spelled Ygor. Adaptations have been so cavalier in their treatment of the book that we’re getting a “new spin” on a character who doesn’t even have a true source to be spun off from. If you followed this aside to completion, you’ve probably put more thought into the “Frankenstein” legacy than the producers of this film.)
At the start, we see Igor working as a wretched circus performer, where his self-taught genius for anatomy largely goes to waste. He’s rescued by eccentric medical student Victor Frankenstein (James McAvoy), who puts Igor’s medical expertise to use in helping find a cure for death. Their relationship vacillates wildly, as Igor can function as an assistant, a peer, and a voice of reason to Frankenstein. The story is driven by Frankenstein’s mad goal of re-animating the dead, which gets complicated by a devoutly religious detective, and a love interest for Igor. Eventually they get around to building their monster, and justifying the film’s existence.
There’s a promising film lurking within “Victor Frankenstein.” McAvoy and Radcliffe play off each other well, and seem to have fun with their roles. This Frankenstein sometimes feels like a lazy homage to action movie geniuses (think Tony Stark’s dry wit, with a liberal dash of Sherlock Holmes’s bracing lack of social graces), but McAvoy does well in displaying the chilling amorality that makes his character capable of pursuing such grotesque work. The story starts out strong, with Igor and Frankenstein diving into the latter’s work, too enamored of their potential breakthroughs to consider the ethics of what they’re doing, but it buckles under an excess of events that feel formulated solely to satisfy audience expectations. We’re force-fed a family history for Frankenstein, and it comes across so blatantly as a plea for sympathy that it’s a waste of time at best, and insulting at worst. The requisite action scenes are well-shot and sufficiently fun, but they’re utterly extraneous. The ending of the film is especially maddening; it’s badly rushed, and it manages to wipe away most of the story that’s been built up to that point. The climactic reveal of the monster effectively nullifies every other plot development, and somehow still manages to feel anticlimactic.
“Victor Frankenstein” is supposed to be part of a series of films that establishes an “Avengers”-esque shared universe for the classic monsters that have appeared in Universal Pictures films (in addition to “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein,” they also produced “Dracula,” “The Wolf Man,” and several others). It’s an ambitious plan – and an expensive one – but if it works, it could be a terrific rejuvenation of some of their most legendary characters. So why does this movie feel like it’s so ashamed of its story? When Frankenstein and Igor are lost in their verboten experiments, with Igor occasionally pulling back to dwell on their attempted blasphemy, it’s engaging, even if we know where the story is going. If the filmmakers wanted action, why couldn’t we spend any time at all watching the two procure the necessary body parts for their experiments? We get two visually appealing but otherwise perfunctory scenes in fancy banquet halls, and no grave robbing, which feels suspiciously like a byproduct of “period piece tropes first, story second” audience appeasement. “Victor Frankenstein” is a cluster of cynically safe story beats and empty action spectacle – it (probably) wasn’t intentional, but the closest the movie comes to resembling its source is in the way it feels like a jumble of disparate parts, clumsily stitched together.
In theaters November 25th
