amirite? LOL!
Hope you enjoyed that hilarious post title. I also hope you won't mind that it's a mask for a film review that takes its subject too seriously. (There should be a warning label on comic book fanboy writing: Abandon all levity/self-awareness, ye who enter here.) Seriously, though, I'll at least
try and keep my discussion of
Marvel canon to a minimum.
So we've got this movie,
X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And you know, deep inside your heart, even as you're making plans to see it, that it is terrible. You accept this. You accept it because it's a summer blockbuster, and because you can forgive Hugh Jackman just about anything so long as he's disemboweling people (while keepin' it PG-13). Lowered expectations are key, and to their credit they got me through the film relatively unscathed. The credits rolled. I stood up.
"Wow, that wasn't nearly as painful as I imagined it was going to be!" I thought, as though I were leaving the dentist's office. That relief lasted for about fifteen minutes before giving way to the dual outrages of a comic fan and moviegoer (the former being the more sensitive of those two sensibilities).
"Wait a minute," I said, stopping just outside of Park St station. "Didn't I read a comic called
Wolverine: Origin? And wasn't it not...
that?"
This was dangerous thinking. Not because the departure is in itself offensive. No, the problem is that the comic was really pretty decent and told a surprising story about Wolverine's (wait for it) origins. So it's baffling that the filmmakers decided to completely avoid depicting any of the events of that series (well, not completely... those first two cursory minutes of film were adapted from the comic, but became the first of
many cliches in their hands). Instead they told a largely non-sensical story that did little to illuminate any of what made Wolverine the character he is, while shoe-horning in every Tom, Dick, and Cyclops they could, regardless of whether the character added anything to the film's plot. The pacing of the film suffers as a result, hobbled by a series of scenes that fail to advance the narrative, which is deadly for a movie as stupid as
Origins. The dialogue's unexpectedly wooden, even for a comic book movie (see: "
I thought you were the moon...") and the plot devices are cliched to the point of exasperation.
The real killer, though - I mean the thing that keeps me talking about this movie long after it no longer deserves to be spoken of - is that it could have been a good and decent romp, but they focused on the wrong story (or arguably on
no story at all). I don't think people care so much where Wolverine's metal skeleton came from as from where the character of Wolverine emerged, an issue that's central to the comics but totally sidestepped in this film. The most entertaining period is at the beginning of the movie, both because the story's flaws haven't yet become glaringly obvious and because it's at this point that there's still potential to see some character development - to see a well-established hero in a new light and understand the extraordinary circumstances that made him. Ideally, I would've liked to see more of the "historical Wolverine," who survived a traumatic childhood and matured in a dog-eat-dog border town. Barring that, we should have at least seen more of his time bumping around the world with the Weapon X team. These early fight scenes were exciting and, with the exception of Will-I-Am, the team's casting was quite good. Plus we could've seen a bit more of the build-up that leads to Wolverine going AWOL; rather than using that as an excuse for the remainder of the film, it could've been a plot point in itself.
I could go on, but I think that's the main point. Potential was there; they had a body of work ready to draw upon. Yet the end result was an incoherent mess, full of plot holes and superfluous "familiar face" characters; a story that dragged itself in circles and then collapsed on the floor, beyond caring. My verdict: Skip it. Watch the trailers for
Terminator: Salvation,
District 9, and
Funny People and you'll have seen the best parts of Wolverine.
...Plus, how do you block
lasers with
claws?
