X-Men Origins: Wolverine

wolverine movie pic
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Any X-Men junkie knows the basic origins of Wolverine. Logan was born decades ago and his mutant healing powers make is so that he does not age; he’s lived through numerous wars and along the line begins to work for an elite unit of the government with Striker. Finally, Wolverine volunteers to be part of a medical experiment and have adamantium grafted with his skeletal structure and becomes pretty much indestructible. Logan also loses his memory and is hunted by Striker without ever knowing why. This is pretty much the story in X-Men Origins: Wolverine but it is not clearly or concisely told. What could have been a very high energy, dramatic origins story was instead badly written and sloppily directed.

The best way to describe the direction of this movie is leading; Gavin Hood seems to be afraid to try anything atmospheric or to let the audience notice what is in his shots. Instead, he inserts coverage for everything he wants to make sure you see, and all of the shots are the basic master, double, close-up for each scene. However, even this would be forgivable if the writing weren’t so lazy.

Wolverine is the classic example of a screenplay where A leads to B which leads to C without any motivation or means of tying incidents together. Characters do not have motivation for anything, and relationships are very forced. Perhaps the best example of sloppy writing was the first time Wolverine is called “Logan”; it comes in the last act of the film and no one has ever called him that before – it seems like a character just makes the name up. There is also the issue of inaccuricies with the comic book; perhaps the biggest in this film is what happens to Deadpool’s character in the last act of the film. Not only does this break with the actual character of Deadpool but it’s just stupid.

What was great about this movie was for fantastic actors: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Ryan Reynolds & Taylor Kitsch. As Wolverine Jackman was phenomenal as usual and you could tell he put his all into this film. Schreiber is perhaps the best embodiment of Sabertooh that I could imagine and he is well paired with Jackman. Somehow he just exhudes an animal nature in a way I didn’t know he could. I have always loved Ryan Reynolds and the wise-crackign nature of Deadpool fits him perfectly; I was very upset that Reynolds wasn’t utilized further. Finally, Taylor Kitsch was chosen to portray the most anticipated character of the series so far as Gambit. Not only was he perfect as the souther-boy card shark, but he was the wonderful charismatic character I always remember Gambit being. I was glad that with all the films other fault we did get a sizeable portion of Gambit.

Wolverine is the kind of film that you’ll probably watch and enjoy once, but I doubt it will be a film that the real fanboys want to analyze and watch repeatedly. The ladies will love the man-candy that is all over this film too.

Director: Gavin Hood
Writers: David Benioff & Skip Woods
Wolverine: Hugh Jackman
Sabertooth: Liev Schreiber
Stryker: Danny Huston
Gambit: Taylor Kitsch
Deadpool: Ryan Reynolds

Victor Creed: Do you even know how to kill me?
Logan: I'm gonna cut your God damn head off. See if that works.