Wolf Man’: What were they thinking?

WTF were Joe Johnston and his screenwriters, not to mention his producers, thinking when they were doing preproduction on “The Wolfman” ? Or were they thinking anything at all?

Here are the top 10 things wrong with what they put on the screen:

1. Benicio Del Toro can’t remember what accent he is using. Oh, they try to cover up his lack of a British accent by saying that he’d been taken to the U.S. as a child. But Del Toro, who is a native of Puerto Rico, can’t figure out what accent he wants to affect. At times I swear he sound like the Mexican character from “Traffic.”

2. Blood, blood and more blood. Updating a 1941 film requires some CGI work. But when that work does little more than depict decapitations, disembowelings and other various bloodletting, what’s the point?

3. They should have done better CGI in other areas. Namely, the depictions of the werewolves themselves. The monsters looked, my wife Mary Pat said, like they were wearing bad Halloween costumes. Whatever, when modern special effects look no better than makeup-wearing Lon Chaney or Oliver Reed, something is lacking.

4. The screenwriters, Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, did little more than transcribe the script that Curt Siodmak wrote for George Waggner in 1941.

5. Even worse, they tried to capture the same tone of Waggner’s 69-year-old film. There’s not a single gag in the entire film to lighten things up even the slightest bit. Even James Cameron wouldn’t have made that mistake.

6. Anthony Hopkins is obviously slumming. Not much you can do there.

7. Emily Blunt tries her best. And she doesn’t break character, even though you gotta think that she was wondering … well, WTF?

8. Hugo Weaving - or, as I like to say, the great Hugo Weaving - plays a central role. And he pulls it off. But is he the actor you want to build the sequel around?

9. Because the sequel is obvious, right? Only … who cares?

10. Which is the best way to end this. When a horror movie is as half-baked as this one, there’s just not that much else to say.

Below : the opening sequence of George Waggner’s 1941 version of “The Wolf Man.”