Victor Frankenstein, Paul McGuigan’s new film starring James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe, is a bit like the most famous iteration of The Monster itself. Bluntly stitched together from an assortment of parts, it lumbers about causing great dismay to all unlucky enough to to make its acquaintance. This isn’t quite an origin story, it isn’t quite a remake, but it’s definitely a gruesome abnormality that should never have been brought to life. No one shouts “it’s alive!” during this deadly exercise in tedium, because that would have been a lie.

As the typically Teutonic action moves to London, we first meet a circus freak (Radcliffe) whose body may be misshapen but his mind is exemplary. He studies medical textbooks in his off hours, when not being bullied by a Steve Reeves-ish strongman. One day a trapeze snaps and the beautiful Lorelei (Jessica Brown Findlay) plummets to certain death. Our yet-unnamed hero can intuit where the bones and organs are and, with the help of a dandy gent, snaps things into place and she’s breathing once more.

Victor Frankenstein - video review Guardian

The other man is Victor Frankenstein (McAvoy), a wealthy medical student who senses that this filthy, hunchbacked man is a raw genius. He takes him home, sucks the pus out of his hump (the only truly great moment in the film; look for it in GIF form soon), puts him in a brace and tells him to shower. Victor’s flat is huge and since his roommate is rarely around, he tells Radcliffe’s character to assume the roommate’s name. Thus, Daniel Radcliffe becomes Igor.

Seeing through the assistant’s eyes, we then spend the remainder of the picture basically twiddling our thumbs. While it is marginally amusing, in a fan-fiction sort of way, to learn how Dr Frankenstein and Igor get to the point where they decide to reanimate an enormous corpse, it soon becomes clear that Victor Frankenstein is a deep dive into the least interesting part of this story. Victor’s early encounters with death (changed here from the book) are still backstory, so the present tense is a great bit “get on with it!” The dithering that takes center stage, including early experiments, antagonism with a local detective (Andrew Scott) and Igor’s slow realization that Victor’s hubris will lead to doom, is all woefully dull. The story is kneecapped since we know where it’s headed, but strangely annoying whenever it deviates. (A subplot where a snotty rich kid decides to underwrite Victor to “own” the system that will conquer death is quite baffling.)

Written by Max Landis, whose awful American Ultra at least had occasional scenes of excitement, Victor Frankenstein is the worst kind of bad movie. Its badness isn’t flamboyant, it’s just in the doldrums. (Points must be given to that other recent, disastrous rehash of a known-property-sans-copyright, Pan, for at least swinging for the fences.) Yet despite the utter lack of mirth or wit to be found, the film thinks it is really clever, making a reference to the Mel Brooks parody and, even worse, offering an in-joke referencing San Diego Comic-Con. That ought to clue you in to its aspirations.

One sequence, in which a hodge-podge of animal parts is readied for the lab, is at least playfully gross, but later moments just throw up their hands and trade any character development for jaunty music and shots of our characters laughing. (Perhaps McGuigan was hoping to inspire fun by osmosis?). The action scenes, all contained on dimly lit sets, show no visual imagination whatsoever. By the end, in which life-giving white lightning spasmodically spurts all over the frame, it’s fair to say that every other Frankenstein film you’ve seen, even the parodies, have had more flair than this.

Don’t blame Radcliffe too much. He does his nice boy routine well enough. And McAvoy should be commended, I suppose, for not going all Johnny Depp on us. He’s simply boring, not annoying. Charles Dance walks into the apartment for one scene, in what reeks of a studio note to “bring some gravitas into this thing, for God’s sake”. But as we know, when something’s dead, it’s dead, and nothing can bring it back.