GamesRadar+ Verdict
Fun enough, but not the lightning-bolt-to-the-heart update we hoped for. For a far superior update of the Frankenstein myth, read Stephen King’s Revival.
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It’s alive! Just…
It’s no good griping that Max Landis’ (Chronicle) riff on Mary Shelley’s classic text throws in backstories and a love story and a crazed chimpanzee called Gordon – cinema’s most famous Frankenstein adaptations, by Universal, Hammer and Mel Brooks, are equally patchwork affairs, as befits a source story about creating new life from ransacked body parts.
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McAvoy gives it his considerable all as the charming, monomaniacal, bullying Victor, and Radcliffe brings his innate likeability to the surgeon’s table, whether he’s experimenting with an accent or dropping it altogether.
Each murky frame is bursting with grime and clutter – this is cutting-edge (Victorian) science in the way Alien is futuristic sci-fi: lived-in, ramshackle, all clunk and clatter – while the novel’s key themes of obsession, rampant ambition and the perils of playing God are all present if not quite correct.
Why? Because everything is too busy, too loud, too determined to do for Frankenstein what Guy Ritchie (big screen) and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (small screen) have done for Sherlock Holmes. Director Paul McGuigan helmed four episodes of BBC’s Sherlock but here the grafts don’t quite take. The result is far from monstrous but it's hardly divine, either.
