Cross-Genre to the Nth Degree
It's safe to say that Brotherhood of the Wolf, the latest offering from French director Christophe Gans, is the first ever Gothic martial arts/period costume drama/spaghetti western/monster movie with political undertones set in late eighteenth-century, pre-Revolutionary France. It's a mess, but often a fun mess, occasionally even a beautiful mess. Imagine a talented cover band that insists on playing familiar songs on completely inappropriate instruments: "Smells like Teen Spirit" on the kazoo and triangle, that insipid ballad from Titanic on feedback-heavy electric guitars. Watching Brotherhood of the Wolf is like listening to a set from such a band. Yeah, it's irritating at times, but the audacity consistently entertains. And when a scene hits the mark, the degree of difficulty adds to the zest of it all.

He Kicks High
We're alerted to the fact that we're dealing with an unusual blend pretty early in the film. A band of ruffians is beating an elderly man and his daughter when two riders arrive to break things up. Why does only one of them dismount to deal with half a dozen hooligans packing quarterstaffs? Because the one guy is Mani, a Mohawk Iroquois who dispenses a kung-fu education to the locals in the driving rain. It's a beautifully filmed whuppin', the slow-motion downpour punctuating bullies eating mud.

What's that? You're sick of every hack director thinking that if he puts the brakes on the camera, he's automatically John Woo? I hear ya, and it's possible that Gans resorts to slo-mo because he lacks the skills to keep up with Mark Dacascos, the actor behind Mani who (I'm told) is an accomplished headliner in martial arts films. Gans keeps leaning on the technique, and, as the film progresses, the slow motion feels less stylish and more like a reflex/stunt. In the opening melee, however, it's irrevocably cool.

The movie's not all that much about the high-kicking, anyway. Mani is the right-hand man of Gregoire de Fronsac, a naturalist sent to Gevaudan by the king to investigate a series of grisly maulings. Some of the locals suspect more than an ordinary wolf is responsible. After inspecting a victim, Fronsac does, too, although he tends toward unusual natural rather than the usual supernatural explanations. At any rate, he's too busy throwing woo at the fetchingly redheaded Marianne de Morangais to move the investigation along all that briskly.

Mmmm... Eye Candy
Things bog down for a while at this point. You can't fault Fronsac's taste, and Marianne is sufficiently self-possessed to rate as more than the "requisite eye candy" character. They're both nice kids, but there doesn't seem to be any real reason they ought to be together. Of course, you could count Marianne's refusal of Fronsac's advances as a necessary impetus to his visits to the local brothel. (Your uncharitable reviewer suggests that he'd be there anyway. Fronsac is described frequently as a libertine.) Then, though, you'd have to make a case for these visits being intrinsically valuable to the plot. Something tells me that Fronsac doesn't really think he's going to find a 500-pound beast with iron fangs hiding under Monica Bellucci's corset. Many of the males in the audiences will excuse Fronsac's lapse in logic. She is stunning, but also more than a little spooky and dangerous. Think Barbara Hershey's character in The Natural, only exponentially sexier.

Just when you're afraid you've wandered into a seedier version of a Harlequin romance, there's a break in the case. A survivor of a beast attack recalls her ordeal in an eerily beautiful fever dream and provides a startling bit of information; the beast has a human master. With this revelation, the pace lurches from plodding to headlong. Reinforcements arrive from Paris. They kill an ordinary wolf, clearly not the source of the rampage, and coerce Fronsac into employing his taxidermy skills in the service of a cover-up. The king wants the matter put to rest. Some agitators are talking up the attacks as God's punishment for the sinful hedonism at Versailles. Faked capture aside, the Beast keeps killing people, and Fronsac goes back to do the job right, well, and to finalize his plans to elope with Marianne, too. He gears up for the big showdown by setting what must be a cinematic record for pumpkins splattered in a single scene. The similarity between splattering pumpkins and taking down 500-pound wolflike creatures should, I hope, be obvious to us all by now.

Thar She Blows!
It is here that we get our first really good look at the creature in action, and he seems like a cross between a stegosaurus and your grandmother's washing machine, except with furry legs. Brotherhood of the Wolf takes a pass on CGI in favor of animatronics, which has the disadvantage of giving the Beast a funky, mechanical kinetic, as if the Tin Woodsman were desperately trying to prove that he's got soul as well as heart. But the advantage is that, unlike most CGI, the Beast looks like he's in the same movie as the rest of the characters. You could even argue that the machinelike movement is part of the point, since the Beast is in fact only a tool of (gasp) a conspiracy.

That's right, a conspiracy, but one of those conspiracies that's so absurdly inclusive that one wonders what the point of even the pretense of secrecy might be. "Welcome to McDonalds, would you like to participate in a shadowy cabal to discredit the King and take over the country?" It threatens to provide a rational explanation for some delightfully crackpot atmosphere, thereby spoiling all the fun. Fortunately, it gets personal between Fronsac and the Brotherhood of the Wolf, and the last forty-five minutes becomes really strange and over-ripe and not entirely unpredictable all at the same time. The carnage level goes off the charts, big Catholic intrigue rears its head, characters die and then don't really, and we find out that the best way to beat a conspiracy is with, that's right, another conspiracy. It's almost enough to give you religion. Almost. The Jehovah's Witnesses who buzz my apartment while I'm hard at work providing newmoanyeah readers with sprawling assessments of slightly obscure films tend not to look so much like Monica Bellucci.

Satisfaction Not 100% Guaranteed!
Brotherhood of the Wolf isn't always as clever as it thinks it is; there's some Philosophy 101 stuff in it that it treats as, like, profound. But while no one's going to be one hundred percent happy with the movie, it has at least a little something for everyone. The cinematographer deserves a bonus. Blues, whites, and reds never looked so good. It's probably not a coincidence that those are also the colors of the French flag. The score even has an agreeable sense of humor about the plot's more tenuous juxtapositions. Brotherhood of the Wolf busts up a lot of genres without ever cobbling together a fitting substitute for the satisfactions of more conventional narratives. It never stoops to apologizing for its unevenness, however, and frequently succeeds in making a giddy virtue of its disarray.