Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster. That much will be a revelation to some folks, and maybe for them this ill-conceived origin story will satisfy.
Not so for anyone bred on classic horror, those who read Mary Shelley's classic novel in school, or just about anyone looking for a credible story with some sort of an emotional core.
There's certainly a lot of story going on in Max Landis' adaptation, to the screenplay's detriment. (Landis should know the genre, being the son of John Landis, director of Twilight Zone: the Movie and American Werewolf In London).
When we first meet the as-yet-unnamed Igor (Daniel Radcliffe), he is a performing circus clown with a terrible hunch. Of course, we couldn't let Radcliffe run around with a hunched back AND that horrible hair, so Victor Frankenstein (James McAvoy), who happens to be trolling the circus for spare body parts, fixes the clown's deformity and saves a lovely acrobat (Jessica Brown Findlay, Downton Abbey) in the process, thereby securing Igor's fidelity.
Reluctant fidelity, that is, as Radcliffe spends a great deal of his screen time playing the moral compass against Victor's vision of cooking up a human being from his own special recipe. Also fretting over the morality of their endeavours is a Scotland Yard detective (Andrew Scott), who lectures the boys on the consequences of playing God while chasing them around a grey and dreary London in order to inject a false sense of energy and dramatic urgency into the plot.
"Chased by monsters and hunted by the police!" complains Igor. "Well, if you're going to concentrate on the dark side..." whines Victor in response.
Ah yes, Victor. Speaking of that bloated story, we are also treated to a kind of psychoanalysis of Victor's childhood trauma; we meet his disapproving dad (Charles Dance) and unearth his motivation to disprove God's existence by creating life out of dead debris.
McAvoy is a fine actor but his Victor is a spoiled, egocentric mess. He and Radcliffe take turns vying for Best Overacting in a Dramatic Role, particularly during the "it's alive"
moments where creature(s) jerk and writhe and the boys yell and duck -and-weave in and out of machinery.
There is plenty of superfluous goo in director Paul McGuigan's film, and one or two sudden scares. When the computer-generated "monster" does appear, he's none too happy to be there. None of the poignancy that made Shelley's monster, Boris Karloff or even Robert De Niro a sympathetic character.
And so this is no one's film: not the monster's, nor a cocky and unlikable Victor, and especially not Igor, who starts off being the potential narrator of the film and ends up being an ineffectual bystander. With no one at the heart of the story it's difficult to stay interested for long.
"It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils." The timing is fitting, I suppose, for a new origin story of Shelley's classic novel to come to the big screen: but there all logic ends.
