“It’s alive,” says Victor (James McAvoy). “Do you realize how significant this is?” asks Igor (Daniel Radcliffe). “I have an inkling, yes,” answers the mad doctor in this retelling/reboot of the classic horror story about a man obsessed with creating a living man from the dead in the horror film, Victor Frankenstein.
Told from the view point of the doctor’s assistant, Igor, the film opens with Igor being in a circus both as the clown everyone picks on and as the traveling group’s doctor. It seems Igor, although struggling with being a hunchback all his life, has a brilliant mind for science and human anatomy. One night at the circus the beautiful flying trapeze artist Lorelei (Jessica Brown Findlay), who Igor is in love with from afar, falls while performing. Igor comes to her aid, as does a stranger from the audience. Both men having knowledge of medicine and work together to save her life. As Lorelei is being taken to a hospital, the stranger begins to leave. Igor asks the man what his name is before he leaves and he turns to reply, “Victor Frankenstein.”
The bosses of the circus aren’t too happy with the stranger suggesting to Igor his medical talent is wasted working at the circus so they decide to lock up poor Igor in an old lion’s cage for the night. Victor returns just a little later and frees Igor, using a magnet to unlock the cage. The team up to fight their way out of the circus grounds.
Victor takes Igor to his loft and tells him that from now on he is to be Frankenstein’s assistant on his experiments and no questions are to be asked. Together the unlikely pair quickly become good friends and a great medical team as they attempt to bring life to a creature made from different animal parts. It turns out that was why Victor was really at the circus that night: looking for spare animal parts. His work has caught the attention of Inspector Turpin (Andrew Scott) from Scotland Yard who’s investigating the crimes.
Finally, Victor and Igor are successful enough in bringing the mangled, horribly put-together animal that’s part chimpanzee to life that they do a presentation at the medical school Victor is attending. It works but is a disaster, with the beast getting loose and almost hurting several people before Victor and Igor put it down. Still, Victor finds a benefactor to further finance his experiments to bring a superior stitched together man to life. That prompts Igor to question the moral, ethical and religious boundaries they’re crossing, all while watching his good friend become obsessed with his experiments and obsessed with bringing to life his horrifying creation.
Hectic and oddly paced, Victor Frankenstein is an action/thriller buddy movie with a great larger-than-life performance by James McAvoy as the mad doctor and an almost too normal Igor portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe.
Both McAvoy and Radcliffe have strong chemistry together as master and servant who become friends, partners, and eventually surrogate brothers to each other. This is the film’s greatest strength, in particular McAvoy as the obsessed doctor who is more out of place out in the real world than his trusted assistant. The film also injects some effective humor into what could be an otherwise lifeless retelling of the classic building-a-monster story. One perfect example of this is when Victor tells Igor not to embarrass him while they are out at a high society party celebrating their latest achievement and in the very next scene an intoxicated Victor is arguing with two lovely and distressed young ladies about creating life without the use of their ovaries and Igor telling him that perhaps this isn’t the time or the place for this conversation.
The film is also full of scenes, props, and sets, including the mad doctors laboratory both in England and later in Scotland, that pay homage to many of the earlier Frankenstein films. The fate of the Inspector’s hand is the same as the Inspector in the classic film Son of Frankenstein and the general design and look of the creature near the end of the film replicates the iconic creature as played by Boris Karloff.
The film does suffer from changing from a fast almost frenzied pace early on to a much slower and drawn-out middle that begins to remove the kinetic energy between the two leading men. Also, the romance between Igor and Lorelei comes off forced and detracts from the real story which is the bond formed between Victor and his trusted assistant.
With great chemistry between the film’s two leading men and a stand-out, at times very funny, performance by McAvoy, Victor Frankenstein is actually worth seeing up on the big screen, especially for devoted Frankenstein movie fans.
GRADE: B-
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for macabre images, violence and a sequence of destruction
Running Time: 109 minutes
Release Date: November 25, 2015
Directed By: Paul McGuigan
