X-Men Origins: Wolverine–Big Shiny Claws, Very Little Bite.
Part of the problem with being in the midst of golden era of cinema comic book adaptations is that now that we’ve gotten a taste of what happens when a popular property gets translated with due respect into a good film we tend to get spoiled. Last year, we got two of the best yet, with Dark Knight and Iron Man. This may sound like I’m setting up to be an apologist for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I wish I could, but it’s a tough movie to defend even in the wake of the vicious fan rape that was X-Men 3.
Hugh Jackman has certainly exceeded most fans expectations for bringing this character to the screen for the past decade. In my eyes, he does the character justice, but Wolverine was never one of my comics and I was never heavily into X-Men. The worst I could probably say about Jackman’s portrayal of the character is that he never really felt as rough, war-torn, or grizzled as my gut interpretation of Logan.
None of this really matters in Wolverine. The real problem is that the action is pedestrian, the story starts promising and fizzles quickly into a series of modest fight scenes and set pieces that never amount to much of an intellectual or emotional kick.
At this stage, if a franchise such as X-Men is going to step back and melt away the ensemble cast to focus on one of the popular standalone characters in an origin story, then I really need to be able to emotionally invest in the character, and there’s almost nothing in Wolverine that allows us to do that. We get some glimpses and a montage near the start establishing Logan’s age and bloody history and establish Sabertooth as his brother. This all lands us in Canada where he’s left the government killing business to settle down with a woman while working as a lumberjack. Their relationship has no grounding or explanation and when the time comes for her to pay the ultimate price at the claws of his estranged brother we have absolutely no emotional reaction whatsoever beyond a breath of relief that we can actually get back to some action. The problem is that beyond the one money-shot of Jackman flying on to the windshield of a helicopter that we’ve been seeing in trailers for the last 6 months, there’s nothing much more to the action other than a series of fight scenes that amount to little more than souped up barroom brawls with a few sparks and flash thrown in.
By the time we get to the third act in this tale of mourning and revenge, I’m begging for the film to be over quickly or at least get me to something memorable that we can at hang my hat on. The problems, however, continue to mount and the rather wooden disjointed story starts to pepper in careless weak attempts to throw some Marvel Comics and X-Men fans some bones here and there along with some inexplicably generous doses of out-and-out silliness.
While I can’t tell you blow by blow how closely this tale mirrors the canon print origins of our favorite century old mutant bad-ass, this entire exercise in mediocrity that is X-Men Origins: Wolverine makes me wonder if there is really any benefit or sense in giving us this backstory. It almost seems to lessen the character’s appeal as the centerpiece of the film franchise not to mention one of the few things worth laboring through the slow, drab and canonically blasphemous X-Men 3: The Last Stand.
By the time the credits for Wolverine begin to roll, even though you’re relieved that it’s over, you can’t but help asking yourself “So that’s it?” Not that it really needs to be even half a minute longer. I was amazed how little of the alleged 100 plus million dollar budget really seems to make it to the screen in this. That’s hardly a fair criticism, but when the story doesn’t deliver and the visuals don’t really deliver there’s little left to justify the ticket price. It’s interesting how incredibly low-budget and b-movie the entire thing feels.
In the end, I can honestly say that even the hardest of blockbuster whores could probably take a break this weekend from fighting the crowds of most-likely disappointed or apathetic fans that I believe will be streaming out of the opening weekend screenings of the film. While it certainly is not pound for pound as weak or disappointing as X3 or the Fantastic Four films, it’s certainly stands as a seemingly completely unnecessary and devastatingly below average entry into current run of superhero genre flicks.
Technorati 
Del.icio.us 
StumbleUpon 
Digg 
Facebook 
Mixx 
Reddit
Tags: Movie Reviews
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
2 Responses to “X-Men Origins: Wolverine–Big Shiny Claws, Very Little Bite.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
May 5th, 2009 at 8:13 am
I actually liked it better than all 3 xmen movies put together. :shrug:
May 6th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
I still have a problem with Deadpool being controlled by long text commands typed into the keyboard that looked like it belonged to a Mac Plus. Also, the whole being shot in the head destroying his memory thing. Where the hell did the bullet holes go by the time the first x-men movie was supposed to take place? Granted, I could have overlooked that if the rest of the movie had did it for me, but it all just felt kinda cheesy. Granted, had this come out before the X-Men films and we didn’t have films like Iron Man, Dark Knight or the first two Spiderman films to compare it to I probably wouldn’t have held it to such a high standard.