This star-studded cast seems to be pulling a fast-n-hairy one as the audience is continually confronted with one idea—Who is the real animal?—only to find out, it’s no one. Or everyone. Take your pick.

The wolf’s growl in the opening scenes fades into Nicholson’s morning mouthwash gargling as his wife asks him about a recent visit to an author in Vermont:

“How did it go?” Charlotte, from the bedroom

“I did it the old-fashioned way.” Will

“What do you mean?”

“I begged.”

The plot: Jack Nicholson is Will Randall, a senior editor of a publishing house who gets bitten by a wolf in the wilds of Vermont, only to return to New York City to begin his slow and over-acted transformation into said wolf. (It’s almost as if Nicholson was called wolf-like so much in reviews that he decided to bite his thumb [paw? dewclaw?] at every lupine-minded observer and simply star as THE WOLF, with all the necessary jaw-clenching, under-biting, and sniffing the role requires.)

Along the way, Will loses his job and his wife to his protégé, smarmily played by the actor everyone loves to hate—James Spader (sorry, ever since Steff McKee in Pretty in Pink). As Nicholson’s character continually gets the shaft, he gets his ruff up and begins to revel in confrontation instead of avoiding it (peeing on his rival’s shoes is especially fun).

In a year in which film producers wanted us to pay for tarnished traps like The Flinstones, Disclosure, and Crumb, Wolf came and went with nary a yelp.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays Laura Alden, the pissed-off rebellious rich daughter of Will’s ex-boss who refuses to be the prize of any man and so is valued by none. I understand why he is attracted to her (who wouldn’t be?) but what is she getting out of the vapid love affair? Laura’s a little long in the tooth to be playing it just for Daddy’s ire.

Mike Nichols uses his sharpest social satire tools for the first half of this movie, and Nicholson is urbane, suave, and gleefully bloodthirsty in his lupine transformation. In the second half, the special effects take the upper paw (honestly I cannot help it), which don’t marry well with Nicholson’s acting or Nichols’s direction. Too bad, as the mad wolf let loose on the wild city is a cunning pairing.

At times, this feels like a fever dream someone had around Halloween after eating too many Mr. Goodbars and watching old Wolfman flicks. If you’ve ever wanted to see Nicholson bite the throat out of a deer, now’s your chance.

In an absolutely blistering review of Wolf, Tom Reimann in Collider says: “Wolf is like playing a practical joke by accident, like that video of a cop shooting himself in the leg while giving a classroom of kids a demonstration on firearm safety.”

With all the heavy hitters behind this—Nicholson, Pfeiffer, Plummer, Nichols, and a one-liner from Alison Janney—you might be tricked into believing that this is a satisfying watch, but you’d be mistaken. It’s too soft-spoken to be a romance, too bloodless to be gory, and too suave to be scary. It’s horror peddled to the same slick movers-and-shakers that Will abhors in the film: aging yuppies.

Wolf toys with the rules of civilized versus wild, but it overplays Randall’s passive behavior at the start (how he’d get to the tippy-top of the publishing house being that passive?) and overuses the trope of the Yuppie Nightmare, the only slot into which this film comfortably fits.

The film resuscitates itself briefly at its climax as Spader makes a passable werewolf, slightly better than Nicholson, but only slightly. The guards are woefully unprepared for, well, anything, but Pfeiffer’s Laura is pretty quick with a fire extinguisher. I did not expect the final moments of this movie to be Spader and Nicholson clawing at one another and sailing through the air in full wolf makeup, but there it is.

If you like insider views on publishing houses and editors turning into werewolves, this may be the combo of your Halloween dreams. You can also glimpse Nicholson’s clumsy, galumphing man-almost-wolf run, and be forever altered.

Much like one of my favorite books The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan, this ends with the Lady Werewolf having the last howl, and because it’s Michelle Pfeiffer, I am peachy-keen with that.