_Wolf_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Women want wild men. At least according to Mike Nichols' _Wolf_, they do. The women in this film's universe are turned on by men who are ambitious, gutsy, and, after a fashion, bloodthirsty. Will Randall (Jack Nicholson) begins the film as a tame guy. He's chief editor at a Manhattan publishing company, about to lose his job (after a billionaire's takeover) to a younger, ruthless, pop-culturally-initiated colleague. Not quite up with the times (he still adheres to the older values of good writing, the importance of art as opposed to Oprah, and a solid backlist), Will is fortunate enough to undergo a serious midlife crisis. One snowy night, driving home from a bargaining session in which he got his contract by, as he puts it, "begging," he hits a wolf with his Volvo. When he attempts to move the animal, he's bitten. This opening sequence bodes well: Will's frantic escape from a pack of wolves whose yellow animatronic eyes gleam in the darkness dissolves into his morning shave, as he's trying to wipe the steam from his mirror. But the image remains appropriately unfocused. As his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) showers in the background, his face comes into view; and it's Nicholson's face, after all, famously ragged and rude, sinister even under the most benign of circumstances. Suddenly, Will's meek mien is visibly altered. He's into rare meat, less interested in shaving, able to edit manuscripts without his glasses, and overhear distant sounds of conversation in his quaintly stodgy and rather cavernous office building. When he's mercilessly demoted by new owner Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will surprises everyone with his ruthless and acute aggression: he decides to avenge his betrayal at work, and his savvy business tactics are impressively... uh... dog-eat-dog. In fact, he has all kinds of enviable abilities: he can run fast enough to catch a deer, leap over high fences, demand a new contract, take on a trio of black kids who threaten him in the park (it's instructive that Will, even in muttonchop-and-fangs canine-drag, receives more audible audience support than these expendable boy characters), and make women love him. His secretary appreciates his fighting back ("It's about fucking time,'' she observes), his estranged wife wants a reconciliation, and he enchants Alden's daughter, Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer). When they meet, Will assures her that he's "safe'' because<> he's married. Of course, she knows (intuits?) better. While Pfeiffer brings some welcome wit and flash to her role as "the- girl-who-must-be-endangered-for-the-climax,'' Laura's attraction to the increasingly hairy Will is disappointingly trite (she's a righteously rebellious heiress; her family history sucks, dad's a vapid shark). When Will confesses his recently acquired physical improvements ("This is really gonna sound insane,'' he begins), she's intrigued, advising him to accept his feral sensitivities "as a gift.'' (Eventually she does feel threatened, but only when pressed by the increasingly annoying script.) For all the film's gestures toward radical defiance of the system (take your pick: commercial, cultural, legal), it's generally fixated on a very standard moral order (there are good wolves and bad wolves). The script, originated by Jim Harrison and revised by Wesley Strick, frames Will's chance at revolt within traditional ethical tenets. Not that the inventive Nicholson doesn't play these tenets to some humorous hilts: see, for example, the "I'm just marking my territory'' scene in the men's room, where he urinates on his cheeky protege Stuart's (James Spader) shoes, his pacing impatiently behind the locked gate-door of a rival's townhouse, or especially, his visit to an ancient lycanthropy expert (Om Puri), where his facial responses to the doctor's admittedly exotic prognosis are dark, complex, and hilarious. Given the film's high conceptual edge (as Pfeiffer observes, "As soon as you say 'Jack Nicholson becomes a wolf,' people laugh''), it's too bad that its ironic potential is so untapped. Will's change of life is less a tragedy than a very tired (and tiring) redemption. (Actually, the pieces for the yuppie-redemption formula do seem to be in place: he learns something from that nonwhite doctor, he rejuvenates his sex life, he discovers his repressed moral fiber: let's not pursue this.) Will's increased social and erotic potency is especially intoxicating for a quietly desperate guy who thought his life was set. And it's not just about immediate sensory effects (ears that move to catch every nuance and whisper, or a sense of smell so keen that he notices tequila on a colleague's morning breath), but also about becoming More Of A Man, designated as a kind of Iron Johnish expressive primitivism (not to mention various allusions to the savage passions of _Altered States_, here available without drugs: this is the nineties). Nicholson carries this business about as far as it can go. But his final battle with another pissed-off wolf looks a little too much like an episode of "American Gladiators.'' That this is staged as if it's about true love takes the plot beyond its early, pleasantly spooky, quirkiness, into a more regular realm of romantic cliches. This is not to say that a werewolf movie does not, by definition, assume or engage such cliches; we know that it must. Yet, _Wolf_ doesn't follow through on its cynical twist on the banalities that are familiar enough to anyone who's seen _The Wolfman_, _An American Werewolf in London_, or _Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein_. Nicholson, as you might imagine, remains more disposed toward cynicism: his performance suggests that it's hard - but not impossible - to be wild under too much make-up. To be "appealingly" wild, well, you need a screenplay that still believes in ancient gender arrangements. Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.