Brotherhood Of The Wolf - English Dub (2001) ***

I hadn't remembered specifics of The Brotherhood Of The Wolf (2001) but I do remember that I saw it when it was first released to the States in early 2002 and I remember loving it. That was 18 years ago though, I was much younger, I watched it in French, and my taste in film has changed. I'm pretty certain that I saw the film at least once more when the DVD was released in 2003.

The melodrama is kind of amusing, the oversexed characterizations are good for a chuckle, Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel are great (as always), and the fight scenes are decent (though too busy and quick-cutty to understand what is happening a good portion of the time). A lot of the techniques (such as the now overused camera slow-downs) were still fairly new at the time, so they probably seemed novel then.

Parts of this genre mish-masher have not aged well at all—namely the titular CGI beast and the film's bloated running time. The English dub does BOTW no favors—it just amplifies the humor to silly proportions. Most of the time though BOTW seems to want to take itself very seriously when in fact it's kind of a big dumb spectacle that would have been better served as a 90-minute feature.