RaveVlog

It begins with Radcliffe’s Igor narrating that there’s a story “we all know,” but that the story he’s about to tell is different … and yes, I said Igor. Radcliffe’s at-first-nameless character is introduced as a much-abused circus hunchback who’s also, get this, a self-taught expert in anatomy and biology. I know, right? He pines for circus acrobat Lorelei (Jessica Brown Findlay), and when she suffers a fall, he and med student Victor Frankenstein (visiting the circus for, um, spare animal parts it turns out) perform a reviving miracle on her … and thus a bond is formed. Victor abducts the future Igor from his sideshow captors, in a scene that brings to mind a Guy Ritchie "Sherlock Holmes" movie, only not as good (yes, you read that right, “only not as good”), and installs him in his lab, the better to assist him in his ambitious, perhaps mad, schemes.

Landis’ script is extremely knowing and endlessly allusive. The Frankenstein here is Mary Shelley’s but his backstory includes a brother, Henry, which is the name of the character played in James Whale’s “Frankenstein” from 1933. A police inspector tracking down Victor and his new pal gets an origin story of his own, one that puts him in line to become the Lionel Atwill character if this movie becomes a franchise, which we ought pray it does not. For all the enthusiasm brought to bear, and again, despite the brio of the young cast (McAvoy makes his “let’s create life” speeches with spittle-projecting eagerness), the movie’s a bloody mess, and a needlessly loud one as well.

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