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'Victor Frankenstein' a not so tempting prequel
Legendary and successful movies tempt moviemakers to create not only sequels but also, at times, prequels
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egendary and successful movies tempt moviemakers to create not only sequels but also, at times, prequels. Victor Frankenstein tells the story of the origins of the man who awakes the dead.
Victor Frankenstein begins with one of its main characters, Igor Straussman (Daniel Radcliffe), telling us that the film's story is about an unholy creation.
What happens next could not be further from the truth. The film, directed by Scottish director Paul McGuigan, is actually in itself an unholy creation that brings shame to the legend created by Mary Shelley nearly 200 years ago.
The film is not an adaptation of the novel. Victor Frankenstein tries to present a prequel to the events that take place in the novel. This could have been an interesting angle that allows for imaginations to run wild and free, but it is so poorly executed that one might wonder why McGuigan did not opt to stick with the original narrative provided by Shelley.
At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to a nameless hunchback, who will later become Igor, who works in a circus as a clown. The hunchback, despite being used mostly as a mockery during shows, falls in love with two things ' human anatomy and a trapeze performer named Lorelei (Jessica Brown).
During a show, Lorelei falls from her trapeze to almost certain death. Among the crowd is a young medical student, Victor Frankenstein (James McAvoy). The hunchback brilliantly assists Frankenstein to save Lorelei, and this event sparks an interest in the young doctor for the metal faculties of this clown, who has spent most of his life as an object of ridicule.
Frankenstein wishes to make the hunchback his assistant, but this does not please the circus owner, who wants to keep his employee. Before long, Frankenstein and the hunchback escape the circus compound to work together, which causes chaos and costs the life of another circus worker who tries to stop them from fleeing.
After the escape, Frankenstein takes the hunchback back to his loft flat. Here, there is a grotesque scene depicting how Frankenstein helps the hunchback stand up straight by sucking a massive amount of body fluid from the gigantic lump on his back. Afterwards, Frankenstein names the hunchback Igor, after a former flatmate who supposedly left due to a drug addiction and never came back.
After several days of living at the flat, Igor, with his brilliance in human anatomy, continues to impress Frankenstein and eventually is made a partner and trusted to work together on a project in which the two aim to bring to life dead animals and even humans.
Meanwhile, back at the circus, Scotland Yard detective Roderick Turpin (Andrew Scott) believes there is something more to the case that took place there than just a hunchback escaping with the help of a stranger. Turpin finds out that whoever helped the hunchback, accidentally also dropped a bag containing a tiger's claws.
For several months, Turpin, a strongly religious man, has been investigating mysterious incidents in which body parts of animals were stolen and this new lead from the circus convinces him that he is getting closer to a target he believes is planning something sinister and playing with wrathful forces.
It seems that McGuigan, in this film, is trying to build a dynamic between Igor and Frankenstein that stands on the same level as what he did with the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson characters in British detective serial Sherlock. However, this effort turns out to be fruitless, as Igor becomes nothing more than a helpless victim in an abusive relationship, which at times yells bromance, with Frankenstein.
In some parts of the film, McGuigan also tries to provide more depth of character. There are notions of Frankenstein's dark past and his obsession with death and Turpin's own personal demons after the death of his wife to cancer, but similar to the dynamic build-up between the two main protagonists, this aspect is not thoroughly and properly explored throughout the 100-minute film.
The plot and the narrative style of the film are tormentingly boring, with chases and escapes following one another.
Right after the circus escape, we are presented with another chase featuring one of Frankenstein's early creations and another one of how the two protagonists try to flee London from Turpin and so on and so forth. In fact, this is probably what the movie is all about: how to escape an obsessive creationist detective while creating your own undead monster along the way.
At the end of the day, the film makes us wonder what on earth drove McGuigan to create a prequel to Mary Shelley's classic story rather than making a movie that tells the original myth of the complicated relationship between a mad genius and his undead creation.
In truth, whenever people hear the name Frankenstein, the one thing that comes to their minds is the story of an undead monster that wreaks havoc in search of redemption towards his creator. But here, in Victor Frankenstein, the undead monster is irrelevant and easily forgotten, as it only appears in the final part of the film. Here we are presented with an uninteresting storyline and debates of God and the right to create life.
Victor Frankenstein, in a sense, is itself an undead monster of a film. It is made from an improper stitching-together of various genres, making it difficult to categorize it either as a fantasy, a horror or a gore film. We see mediocre acting from a cast of promising actors, and it is safe to say that it should have been left for dead.
