A Trickster Review : Brotherhood of the Wolf

[The Trickster]

Brotherhood of the Wolf is a French film loosely based (and I mean loosely) on an historical event that occurred in between the years of 1764 and 1767. When close to 100 people were brutally killed in the French district of Lozere, the community formed the notion that some sort of large beast was roaming the wilderness, attacking victims at random. The story has been retold in various forms throughout the last couple of hundred years, but nothing even slightly resembles what director Cristophe Gans has concocted. During the movie’s two and a half hour running time, there are far too many plot twists and subplots for me to summarize neatly, especially without giving too much away. I will tell you that it involves lots of action packed fight scenes, prostitution sex scenes, extremely graphic deaths, along with a romantic, historical undertone.
At heart, the film is a horror movie, with a monster killing off people one by one. What sets Brotherhood of the Wolf apart from the rest of the over-saturated genre, is the mixing of other styles. To give you some idea of what I’m talking about, if you mixed Last of the Mohicans with The Matrix and had John Woo direct it, you might end up with something similar to Brotherhood of the Wolf. It really is quite unnerving to see a French director make such an American movie, but it still manages to keep the bizarreness and creativity of standard French productions.

The Good
WOW! The style and atmosphere of this film are utterly amazing. It has become quite typical for horror films to slowly build up the story, making the audience sit through an hour of dodgy acting and narrow storytelling, leading up to a last half an hour of action and creature effects. From the first few minutes of Brotherhood of the Wolf, the action comes thick and fast. We see a brutal bone crunching death, followed by an awesome fight scene, before a story is even remotely visible. Throughout the movie, the action scenes are neatly interspersed, never allowing the audience to get bored. What’s more impressive, is that when no-one is kicking the crap out of someone and the monster isn’t chewing on another victim, the general story is both intriguing and well performed.
The special effects are fantastic, including the beast. The whole movie could easily have been let down by an average CGI monster, but it really does look quite horrifying and extremely powerful. It doesn’t always move completely smoothly, but it is generally very impressive. The sound effects also deserve a mention. With all the action occurring onscreen, the film makers have turned the volume up, with every crunch and scream pounding through the cinema. It really is state of the art stuff.
The fighting is also of a very high quality. Mark Dacascos and Samuel Le Bihan have very differing fighting techniques, with Mark obviously having a very expert knowledge of martial arts and Samuel more likely to hit someone with a brick than fly kick someone in the head. The choreography is good, and the camera work inspired.

The Bad
As much as I obviously enjoyed this film, it has many flaws. Some of these can be overlooked because of the type of film we’re talking about here, such as the complete ridiculousness of an Indian that is expert at martial arts, and a gorgeous and powerful woman, spending her spare time at the brothel. These sorts of things are intentionally added for the audience’s entertainment, and I shall treat them as such. Other things are a little less easy to overlook, such as some of the poor acting and the major anticlimax that is the end. The acting by most parties is pretty good, and moves from passable to very good. A few of the cast are quite woeful though, and stand out like sore thumbs.
The ending is what disappointed me the most! If the film had managed after two hours of action, romance and intrigue to climax with a memorable and jaw dropping conclusion, I would give this movie an even higher rating. As it stands though, the film is overlong, with the last 30 minutes being a bit of a drag. I will not ruin the ending for other prospective viewers, but I will say that it’s rather dull and unimaginative, which is something I cannot say about the rest of the film.
Finally, and this may bother other people more than it did me, I think if you took all the slow motion parts and ran them at full speed, the movie would be about 20 minutes shorter (slight exaggeration). Slow motion can be effective, especially during high speed action scenes and chair gripping suspenseful moments, but if used too much, can seem tacky. I could guess when the slow motion was going to kick in by the second half of the film, as it was done far too frequently.

Overall
If being entertained by superb action with gripping suspense, while viewing beautiful women and musclebound heroes tracking down a powerful and viscous beast, all portrayed with style and atmosphere, sounds like your type of flick, then what are you waiting for. It’s by no means a perfect film, but I do feel that the makers have successfully covered all the sparse ground that they set out to cover.
I can’t wait to get it on DVD!

8.5 out of 10.

[johnny]

Good movie, dissapointing end.

[Darkman]

Great review! I agree with just about everything you said. Le Pact des Loups was an awesome and original movie that will hopefully raise the bar for Hollywood action/horror movies, although they seem to be quite content putting out rubbish at the moment

One thing I'd like to add is that the Brotherhood of the Wolf dvd has an excellent English dubbed version in addition to subtitled versions. I still prefer subtitles myself, but the dubbing was actually well-done this time with most of the voice overs sounding like they should sound and corresponding well enough to lip movements.

[Gammit]

Excellent background info! I enjoyed the movie a lot! Maybe the French aren't so bad... (: