Wolf

Wolves are the largest members of the dog family. Adult wolves have 42 teeth. They prefer to eat large mammals like deer and moose. They can weigh up to 175 pounds.

All of these trivial facts are more interesting than most of what we get in the 1994 romantic horror flick Wolf, the Mike Nichols-directed take on werewolf films from a screenplay by Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick. Wolf is a film in which I had mostly low expectations that were by the end met. The first half of the film is wherein the potential for something greater lies. This is a werewolf movie, but our wolfman here is a sophisticated yet banal editor-in-chief, making this story ripe to do whatever it wants to do, and yet it doesn't take the bait. Early test reactions to the ending were negative, so a new, action-packed one was shot. By that point, though, I couldn't wait for it to be over.

Jack Nicholson (in his second-last of seven horror movies in his career) plays Will Randall, a successful editor-in-chief at a large publishing house in New York. Trouble is brewing for Randall, however, as the tycoon Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer) has recently purchased the publishing house and plans on replacing Randall with his protégé, Stewart Swinton (James Spader). To make matters much worse for Randall, while driving home in snowy weather after negotiating a deal in Vermont, he accidentally hits a black wolf. While attempting to move the seemingly dead animal off the road, the wolf suddenly reanimates and bites him in the hand before darting back into the woods, where it's protected by its pack. (Another fun fact from wolvesmatter.org that's more interesting than Wolf: "Wolf packs work together to hunt for food. The loss of one wolf from a pack can damage cohesion of the group and can cause packs to break up.") Randall escapes and hurries home.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) for Randall, things start to drastically change for him. His senses are heightened, so much so that he can tell what kind of liquor someone has recently drunk and can edit manuscripts without his reading glasses. His hair starts to grow back and become youthful-looking again. He can hear virtually anything, including every conversation in the building. His sex drive rapidly increases. These newfound heightened senses give him a new purpose, mainly for revenge against the back-stabbing sycophant Stewart. "Ruthless" is the word that's used to describe him, and the scenes of him being so are the most captivating to watch.

But Wolf is a werewolf movie, and it's the "man-wolf" scenes that are the most ridiculous, expectedly. Going into a movie like this understandably requires a certain level of tolerance toward the silliness and definitely loads of suspension of disbelief, but Wolf takes that agreement for granted. The film made a profit, though, earning $131 million worldwide from a large $70 million budget, so despite the subpar appearance of the horror effects and sets, audiences at least somewhat embraced the...I don't know what to call it—camp, I guess, as Randall increasingly metamorphoses into a wolf and howls at the moon. You've heard of An American Werewolf in London; this is "A Callous Werewolf in New York Not Afraid to Take On Armed Men About to Mug Him."    

Nichols certainly pulled out the big guns for this film, his only horror movie. In addition to uncredited screenwriting work from his longtime collaborator Elaine May, the score is by Ennio Morricone, the makeup effects are by Rick Baker, and the production design is by Bo Welch. All of them, however, put in much better work before and since, especially Baker, whose makeup effects make Spader basically look like a thin version of Fat Bastard and Nicholson look like an older Wolverine. There's nothing particularly noteworthy about Morricone, Welch, or Baker's contributions to the film; the same could largely be said about the acting, and certainly the characters. Other than Nicholson's Will Randall, every other character is about as two-dimensional as possible. The other huge star here is Michelle Pfeiffer, who worked with Nicholson on The Witches of Eastwick. Pfeiffer plays Alden's daughter, often in trouble with the law and not a big fan of her father. Pfeiffer does a fine job, no doubt, but her character only serves as a sex object for Randall and to a lesser extent another element of animosity between the protagonist and his jerk boss, Alden. 

Both Nicholson and Spader overdo it from time to time, but it's less bearable watching the latter do it. Nichols at least got Nicholson to tone down the obnoxiousness that was present in Carnal Knowledge, the first film the two worked on together. (They also collaborated together on Heartburn.) That being said, it's impossible to take your eyes off Nicholson. For one, he's in basically every scene, usually at the center. Even watching him eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and drink a glass of milk can be fascinating. It may not be his most challenging work ever, but he and some of the others make it look like a piece of cake. There are also a variety of pre-stardom cast member appearances here in almost blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments, such as Allison Janney, David Schwimmer, and Peter Gerety.  

Wolf is usually rather predictable; the only thing anticipated about it that follows through is its absurdity. The simplest way of describing Wolf is that at times, it's more or less watchable. But it certainly becomes less so during its second half. One of the fundamental problems with Wolf is that it's not sure what it wants to do. Is it a conventional horror feature? Does it want to satirize the dog-eat-dog world of editing? Is it trying to do something different? All of the above? Who knows, and who cares?