Based on an 18th-century French legend, Christophe Gans’ latest film, “Brotherhood of the Wolf,” gives the foreign film genre its biggest public boost since “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”The success of the movie is due to Gans’ ability to make his film accessible to wide audiences by using nearly every film genre there is.The film opens at the time of the French Revolution. An old aristocrat is locked in his home, attempting to finish his memoirs before the local peasantry takes him away to the guillotine.He writes about the Beast of Gevaudan, a mysterious creature responsible for the deaths of more than a hundred women and children.Flashback to 1765: the Beast is reigning terror on the populace and its unsuspecting victims. With the failure of conventional hunters and trappers, King Louis XV dispatches renowned scientist Gregoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) and his Iroquois companion Mani (Mark Dacascos) to hunt down and kill the creature responsible.Upon arriving in the province of Gevaudan, the two soon-to-be heroes are met by a threatening group of bandits. Mani fights them off with a kendo stick in an out-of-place, Hong Kong-style action sequence that is entertaining to watch.Once Fronsac and Mani are settled in the town, they begin the arduous task of searching out the Beast’s lair.Throughout the film, Mani befriends the wolves in the forest to find the creature, and Fronsac becomes romantically involved with both an aristocrat’s daughter and a high-priced prostitute.As mentioned earlier, Gans weaves genres together so that his film has mass appeal. He weaves such a rich tapestry of action, adventure, drama and romance that it becomes almost too much to handle.However the two-hour-plus running time allows for the plot to be well balanced and not boring.As with any subtitled film, plenty of reading is required in order to understand what is happening. For some people, that may take away from viewing the film, but if you are quick enough to read the lines at the bottom of the screen, you should be okay.The director keeps the dialogue to a bare minimum during the fight scenes, giving the audience an opportunity to soak in the marvelous choreography by Hong Kong stunt coordinator Philip Kwok.Le Bihan and Dacascos turn in excellent performances as the film’s heroes, but it is the beautiful Sylvia, played by Monica Belluci, who is sure to captivate audiences as a prostitute with more to her than meets the eye.Still, several questions are left unanswered:Where did Mani and Fronsac pick up kung fu and other martial arts exploits? Why would an aristocrat’s daughter stay with a man who sleeps with a prostitute? Why do all rural towns have links to the occult? And so on. But the trick of “Brotherhood of the Wolf” is that so much happens in the movie that you won’t be asking any of these questions until the car ride home. And Gans’ ultimate success is creating an absurd yet entertaining film.
Native American character Mani, one of the film’s two heroes, uses some martial arts skills to fight a gang of bandits in Brotherhood of the Wolf. (Universial Pictures)
