5/10
Beauty and The Beast go down to the woods to play.
The Beast, at least when the moon is full, is Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro), whose American accent is explained by his having left home many years before to become an actor in the States. He has come home because his brother has died in mysterious and unexplained circumstances. At the mouldering family pile, he finds that his father (Anthony Hopkins) is rather less grief-stricken than might be expected; and then there is Beauty aka Gwen Cunliffe (Emily Blunt) his brother's fiancee, who is a appropriately distraught, though not necessarily averse to some sibling upgrading. Werewolf films are hard to pull off. There are the Jekyll/Hyde undertones of the unacknowledged monster inside, but there's also a lot of special effects work needed, and the fact that even in England, there are never any cloudy nights when the full moon is out. Del Toro has the advantage of looking fairly lupine even before Rick Baker works his magic; Hopkins is more subdued than usual, and Blunt works wonders with relatively little to go on - the girl has star power. You also have to make allowances for the cheesy origins of the film, and the necessity of portraying a late 19th Century England straight out of the Holllywood cliche manual. At the risk of damning with faint praise - it's not as bad as I expected.
