Photo by: Twentieth Century Fox
Violence? Check. Explosions? The hero walks toward the camera while a vehicle explodes behind him. That is a big check. This must mean that it is now finally time to cross over into the summer box-office blockbuster season.
The season starts off with a pretty powerful entry into the X-Men franchise with “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” Or as my mother would put it, Hugh Jackman’s sculpted butt plus a movie.
This movie explains how our favorite belligerent Marvel Comics superhero got his powers and tries to set the stage for his memory loss over the course of the rest of his franchise.
The film begins with a less than auspicious start. The acting talents of the young Wolverine and Sabertooth reminded me of a young Anakin Skywalker ten years ago.
But the pace picks up, and the film gains some strength. Anyone familiar with the character Wolverine in either past movies or comic books knows that subtlety, wit and thoughtfulness are not his style. The movie revels in his belligerence and violence, while making occasional and shallow forays into his humanity.
As this is an action movie, explosions, eviscerations and a plethora of special effects are ever present.
It doesn’t hurt that the movie also includes a couple of scenes featuring rear nudity on the part of Jackman. I mean, it doesn’t hurt for the female viewers out there. I certainly didn’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other – certainly nothing deep and forbidden.
About halfway through, the film begins to descend from the hype that it created.
Vast holes in the plot, characters killed off because it’s convenient and others introduced simply for the sake of giving dedicated comic book fans tiny nerdgasms – all these things make for a predictable and sloppy affair.
It also doesn’t help that the film is a prequel or that it takes an impersonal approach to the hero’s origin story. From a veteran X-Men moviegoer’s perspective, “Wolverine” somehow manages to take place in the same universe as the other three films while changing the story enough to run parallel with them. This origin story doesn’t add much to the X-Men mythos.
Jackman is a consistently excellent actor, and Liev Schreiber matches him as Wolverine’s violent and twisted brother Sabertooth. The weak script hampers them both to the point where you’d never be able to tell.
Furthermore, when you cast Ryan Reynolds in the role of the smart-alecky antihero Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, you should not take away his ability to speak for half the time he’s on screen.
“X-Men Origins: Wolverine” has some great action, but it simply doesn’t stand up to the standards of the original X-Men trilogy. It’s a fine popcorn movie and should be successful enough to generate further entries into the “X-Men Origins” franchise. Let’s hope that “X-Men Origins: Magneto,” should it get the green light, takes it somewhere.
