Review of Victor Frankenstein (2015) by Dottheeyes — 27 Nov 2015

This is a handsome, but empty production. Or, put another way, it is an imposing shell energized by the lightning of fine acting and craftsmanship, but adrift without a soul. The idea is obvious: create a spry, postmodern, and loose adaptation of the often-often-adapted Mary Shelley novel to attract the audience which drove Guy Ritchie's two enjoyable Sherlock Holmes films to around one billion worldwide.

But Shelley's gloomily Romantic story of science gone awry (and the prior cinematic versions which gave us malformed laboratory assistant Igor and "IT'S ALIVE!") proves an uncomfortable candidate for too-cool-for-school revisionism.

The result is a curious case of hyperactive lethargy in which no charming diversion—not a wild-eyed camp performance by James McAvoy as the title character, not a love story for a straightened and beautified Igor (Daniel Radcliffe), not the extensive Victorian-era production design, not composer Craig Armstrong's thundering original score—distracts from the fact next to nothing of consequence is transpiring, and there is a waning sense of anticlimax when the film finds its way around to the main creature-feature attraction just in time to end.