Bloody Sheets, Bad Sweaters, and Broken Hearts: The Wisdom Of Crocodiles

Elina Lowensohn, happy to be
free of the usual strict bobbed hairstyle.

To his credit, everyone else does, too. Did people really dress like that in 1990s London? I imagine so. Not that folks dress particularly better these days, but still. Especially on tasty numbers like Jude Law and his more shag-worthy co-stars Jack Davenport (yes, from the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies) and Elina Lowensohn (yes, from all the Hal Hartley movies, and the star of another of my favorite vampire films, Nadja). Tim Spall (yes, from the Harry Potter movies) manages to escape this fate, since he plays a cop.

The story is relatively uncomplicated; Grlscz needs blood and love in equal measure, so he serially seduces lonely, untethered, independent women (all of whom are depicted in a natural, genuine fashion—they may be mere symbols, but they’re not clichés), gains their trust, makes them fall in love with him before he drinks their blood, kills them, and finds out how they really feel. He is caught up in a web of intrigue as the accidental discovery of one of his previous bodies brings him to police attention, meanwhile trying to get into the pants (and heart) of a new woman. Oh, and he’s not feeling too well, either; he hasn’t tasted true love in so long that his body has started to break down.

This is all brought to us in a slow-moving, somewhat talky fashion, occasionally interspersed with erotically troubling sex scenes and one particular moment of violence that outs the director as a veteran of the Hong Kong action school of filmmaking. Indeed that’s the case; helmed by Po-Chih Leong, that one sequence is pretty cool, even though it almost doesn’t go with the rest. Suffice it to say, it’s pretty sweet, and makes me wish that Jude Law did more action movies. On the other hand, there are better hand-to-hand fights on Buffy.

Even though Leong pretty much never did anything else ever again (neither did screenwriter Paul Hoffman) and this movie does score high on the boring and brooding meters, The Wisdom Of Crocodiles is still a worthy film for viewers who want a little brains with their blood (brains in an intelligence sense, not in a hungry zombie sense), lovers of extremely good production design, vampire completists, and, of course, those Jude Law stalwarts who remain. Just be aware that sometimes the dialogue is painfully inept, there’s not really much drama, and the sweaters invoke pity. But hey, c’mon, there’s a guy in the cast named Hitler Wong. It’s worth slapping on at a Halloween party. In the corner. Of the makeout room. Where no one will really pay any attention to it. Or think of it as Twilight with the training wheels taken off.

“According to this text,
you should be bursting into flames any minute now.”

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