There comes a point in the life of every story where the possibilities have already been exhausted, and new storytellers are forced to focus on some very tiny minutia if they want to do anything original with it. Frankenstein, for instance, has been told, and retold, and parodied, turned into a superhero story, made into kids cartoons and transformed into a kaiju for crying out loud. What the heck is left?
Victor Frankenstein solves this problem, which was barely a problem to begin with, by focusing on the mad scientist’s henchman Igor, who was barely a character to begin with. Everybody seems to know that Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant was a hunchback named Igor, but the character wasn’t in Mary Shelley’s original novel, and even in James Whale’s classic 1931 film, the guy was named “Fritz.” Variations of the lab assistant Igor have appeared over the decades, but he was never officially a character until parodies like Young Frankenstein, and he was rarely – if ever – treated seriously as his own entity. Because once again, he barely existed in the first place.
And so screenwriter Max Landis and filmmaker Paul McGuigan bring you Victor Frankenstein, a film that exists entirely to cement Igor’s validity in the pop culture firmament. Once more I remind you that this is the solution to a problem that nobody complained about in the first place, and as such the whole film – though entertaining and well-crafted – feels remarkably disposable. It’s like dedicating an entire movie to one of Superman’s robot duplicates from The Fortress of Solitude. Sure, that’s a novel approach, but you had better have a damned good reason to make the story, suddenly, all about them.
20th Century Fox
To their credit, the makers of Victor Frankenstein are striving to turn their new vision of the classic tale into an emotional exploration of the characters, focusing on a complex dynamic between the mad doctor and his faithful assistant. Frankenstein (played with hammy relish by James McAvoy) rescues the brilliant hunchback Igor from the circus, cures his ailment and sets about the task of reanimating the dead. Igor (played with boyish vulnerability by Daniel Radcliffe) is torn between his loyalty to Frankenstein – the only person who ever believed in him – and the looming dread that Frankenstein’s obsessions will lead to horror and madness.
Giving Frankenstein an intellectual equal with whom he can share his passions seems like an excellent idea on paper, until you realize that there are already reams of paper dedicated to exploring Victor Frankenstein’s psyche in the first place. (Such as, for instance, Mary Shelley’s original novel.) The buddy dynamic is enjoyable here because McAvoy and Radcliffe are dedicated to their characters, because their dialogue is both funny and sentimental, and because McGuigan has dropped them into a world rich in gloomy detail… but not because their relationship adds anything significant to the text.
Victor Frankenstein never shakes off this unfortunate odor of redundancy, and – with the notable exception of Igor – it never introduces any new elements to the story that haven’t already been played with extensively in earlier iterations. Landis’s script repeatedly tells us that history will remember the monster, not the man who created it, which is an amusing commentary on the longstanding confusion about whether or not the monster itself was also named “Frankenstein.” It neglects, however, to acknowledge the fact that Victor Frankenstein, the scientist, is already one of the most significant characters in all of literature… regardless of that famous little quirk in the collective cultural memory.
20th Century Fox
If anything, the dedication to Victor Frankenstein and Igor as tragic comrades forces McGuigan’s film to minimize the importance of the monster itself. Victor Frankenstein acknowledges the moral complexities of making a new life form in the laboratory but diminishes the actual creation by reducing it from a fellow character to a last minute boss battle; a beast who must be destroyed, and not a creature worthy of sentiment. Instead, that sentiment is reserved for a title character who has already been depicted in detail throughout the last century and a half, and for Igor, a character who adds a new angle to Victor Frankenstein but contributes little to the mythology now that he’s finally been fleshed out.
What we have here is an eccentric little side note: an energetic and stylish retelling of Frankenstein that will no doubt wile away an afternoon but contributes nothing memorable to the original tale. Igor now has a movie of his own, but like Igor himself, it is merely a footnote in a richer, more meaningful tradition of Frankenstein.
Top Photo: 20th Century Fox
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
