Better late than never with: Brotherhood of the Wolf

I finally got my hands on a copy of “Brotherhood of the Wolf” and here are my thoughts of it. But before I get into it, I want to say. I’ve never had an interest into this film, I’ve heard about it years back, and it never caught my intention. I’ve always thought of this as a weak horror story with French people. And after reading Jim’s thoughts about it, I was not so eager to check this one out. But I did kind of hope I could add this to my Horrible Movie’s list. But see what I thought after the jump.

The story takes place in the 1700’s with a wild beast roaming France, killing men, women and children. With no signs of stopping, the King of France commands many of his men to stop this beast at once. As many try and fail, only two men have the skill and courage to stop it. Though most of the royalty disregard this beast as just a mere wolf, their true ignorance shines brightly as many of their own die. Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) and his brother, a Native Indian from Canada (w00t), Mani (Mark Dacascos) are two to stop this beast once and for all.

Mani is the calm but deadly killer!

The movie does have a slow pace, and that is my biggest complaint in this whole movie. With a running time of 142 minutes, it took me through a rollercoaster of emotions. I started really excited with the first 10 minutes, to boredom, to frustration and finally with angst than repeat for the rest of the movie. I was excited because you first don’t see the beast but you know it is a grand one from how it annihilates its first victim. Than leads to boredom as the story kicks in and takes its sweet time to settle in, this leads me to be frustrated with how slow the movie is going but than it gets interesting by throwing in a hint of some action. This is where I get angsty and really want to see what happens next. As this amazing and fun scene takes place I am back with excitement and the circle continues.

This brings me to what I love about this movie, and that is the fight scenes. They were amazing to watch and fun, both Mani and Fronsac have their share of fights. But I admit I do like Mani’s more, it has a lot more hand to hand and martial arts, which I am a fan of. Also his stunts he does are rather riveting to watch. Not to be outdone, Fronsac has great fights with this swords and guns which aren’t as fun to watch as Mani’s but still no snoozer. But again, because these fight scenes are well spaced out, it is easily able to get bored in-between.

Both Fronsac and Sylvia have a thing for each other.

I can’t say much about the acting, as my French stinks and the dubbing ruins the vocals of the movie. I did however liked seeing Vincent Cassel, who was the Kings’ son Jean-Francois. He was awesome in Oceans Twelve and Thirteen, so seeing him was a treat. Also both Sylvia (Monica Belluci) and Marianne (Emilie Dequenne) is drop dead gorgeous and the Victorian style outfits definitely help out.

Last annoying thing of the movie was the special effects. They were on par with Alien 3; terrible CG! But least the real life model was cool to look at. Amazing detailed and kind of scary, too bad the CG really made it lame.

As much as I hated how this film dragged this story along, I didn’t hate it overall. That said, I also did not love this movie, just a good movie. The fight scenes were good, the story was fun to watch (next time I should just Fast Forward through it) and the women were attractive. If you can get over the extremely slow and varying pacing I would totally recommend everyone to see it. But fair warning it is a niche movie.