REVIEW: The Werewolf Within is something you can do without

In the hit movie “Tomorrow War”, Sam Richardson brings the chuckles to a storyline unsuited to the sustained comedic punch line. But he still found a way to underline his performance with humor.

“It was pretty tightly written, but I got to improvise a lot actually. My first scene where I’m meeting Chris [Pratt]’s character, Dan, that’s mostly just an improvised monologue. [Director] Chris McKay was very open and excited for me to get to play around whenever I could and inject myself into the script,” he says.

As he played around, he delivered an ‘otherworldly’ performance in every sense of that word.

Returning to earth, specifically the small town of Beaverfield, Sam Richardson plays Finn Wheeler, a Ranger who has to save the town from itself and from, wait for it, a werewolf.

As the title suggests, the horror-comedy “Werewolf Within” provides an entirely different script for Richardson to inject himself into.

As he jumps onto this assignment, he also jumps the bones of a mailperson named Cecily (Milana Vayntrub).

Well, he almost does.

Their off/on relationship that was never on in the first place thaws the snowy terrain of Beaverton with a potentially hot and heavy romance.

In the process, sub-themes insinuated into the plot by the political tension between liberals and conservatives play out as the town is split down middle by those for and those against the construction of a pipeline.

However their crossed-swords serve as broad parodies of both progressives and conservatives who come across as hilariously exaggerated versions of their contrasting political orientations.

This turns them into breathing stereotypes, thereby combining their clichéd idiosyncrasies into one gloriously artful summary of why being “woke” or asleep are two sides of the same question regarding why their “whys” cannot be reconciled by their “hows”.

Hunkering deep in the no-man’s land of this dispute is the backwoodsman Emerson Flint (Glenn Fleshler), who earns the suspicion of both sides by belonging to neither.

When people start dying, he is the Prime Suspect until scientific expert Dr. Ellis (Rebecca Henderson) verifies whether a werewolf could actually be to blame.

As they wait to discover whodunit, a Murder on the Orient Express-type suspense heightens with the comedic leaps to conclusion of what is actually going on.

Michaela Watkins and Michael Chernus play a conservative couple, Trisha and Pete; who are so very silly, especially when Trisha cries over her murdered dog Cha-Chi.

Then there’s the two married millionaires who own a yoga studio, Harvey Guillén’s Joaquim and Cheyenne Jackson’s Devon. These two are gay liberals of mixed race to emphasize their wokeness, no doubt.

Gwen (Sarah Burns) and Marcus (George Basil) are the pasty-white trash who line up behind the conservatives in the same way Donald Trump followers are largely coal-smeared poor white folk clinging to “religion and guns.”

They are the funniest of the whole cast in the way come across as vacuum-brained bumpkins who seem to get it, but then again, not so much.

When the plot thickens, all the characters barricade themselves in the house of Jeanine (Catherine Curtin). And, for good measure, they all get their guns ready, just in case any of them might be next.

This sets the scene, if you like, for many funny lines along lines of:

Finn Wheeler: Well, we're having a good old fashioned sleepover.

Marcus: With guns though.

Finn Wheeler: With guns yes.

 

The plot and subplots align into clever satire before giving way to an anticlimactic finale.

The anticlimax ensures that all the fun you were meant to be having with the playfully fluent socio-political commentary is stopped in its tracks like the “Uhs” which punctuate a Barrack Obama speech.

Inevitably, this puts the ‘poof’ into spoof as the movie goes up in smoke.