MONSTER CRASH
T HERE’S something alarming in “Victor Frankenstein,” but it isn’t the reanimated bits of corpse that make up a monster. It’s James McAvoy’s acting: It’s as if he’d been locked in a castle with a lot of bad Nicolas Cage movies.
McAvoy’s V.F. is a twitchy nutter who bangs his head against support beams while Daniel Radcliffe, who plays the hunchbacked assistant Igor, wonders how his character is somehow forced to be the normal one.
Igor and Victor — who meet at a circus where the former is a freak but the latter is merely collecting dead animal parts he can assemble into a monster he intends to bring to life with electrical charges — soon find themselves roommates in a madscientist man-cave where they try to revive dead chimps.
Meanwhile, a detective (a dead-eyed Andrew Scott) sniffs around their deeply weird and secretive laboratory, but when he raises questions about the lab, he is assumed to be barmy. (This, despite Victor having successfully brought the Frankenchimp to life in front of several witnesses and subsequently boarded up his house, all while being wanted for murder at the circus.)
Trying to jolt this material to life, screenwriter Max Landis and director Paul McGuigan fail to find much in the way of a new angle: Victor is haunted by memories of his dead brother, while Igor has a love interest, a trapeze artist (Jessica Brown Findlay of “Downton Abbey”) whose job is mainly to be available to wear elaborate ball gowns at all times, even around the house.
Apart from a few agreeably spooky moments in the lab, the film seems mainly to amuse itself coming up with ways to work in lines like, “It’s alive!” and “Yes, master” as it proceeds to an inevitable climax in a remote castle where “the new Prometheus,” as Victor calls his creation, comes disastrously to life amid thunder and lightning.
By going exactly where you think it’s going, “Victor Frankenstein” doesn’t so much invent a fresh origin story as it essentially repeats, with a few uninteresting new details, all the same stuff we’ve seen in the other 457 Frankenstein movies.