Gavin Hood’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine is about as unwieldy as its title: it’s a big, sprawling mess of summer blockbuster, but lovable just the same.
Hood, the South African director of the Oscar-winning Tsotsi and the forgotten Rendition, would seem an unlikely choice to direct a comic book prequel, and he is: the serious tone and languid pace he brings to a script overflowing with colorful mutants, divergent ideas, and corny dialogue is a more jarring shift than what, say, Marc Forster brought to Quantum of Solace.
For a simple origin tale, which was already (mostly) handled in X2, this thing is overloaded with plot. We start out in 1840 Canada, with young mutants Logan and half-brother Victor taking it on the lam after Logan kills their father.
Flash-forward a few years, and Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Victor (Liev Schreiber) have migrated to the US and stopped aging (why they stop aging at this point, I’m not so sure), fighting in the civil war and major wars up to Vietnam, where Victor goes a bit haywire and kills a commanding officer. They’re sentenced to death, but of course, they cannot die.
So William Stryker (Danny Huston) comes along and offers them a chance to work for him instead of rotting in military prison. We’re quickly introduced to Stryker’s colorful team of mutants, which include Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), The Blob (Kevin Durand – he’s not The Blob yet, but soon will be), Agent Zero (Daniel Henney), Bolt (Dominic Monaghan) and Kestrel (Will i Am).
If you’re not an X-Men fan, these characters won’t mean much to you, here they’re a standard mercenary crew with a superpower each to distinguish them. But that’s part of the fun in Wolverine, playing spot-the-mutant; before the film is over, we’ll have Gambit, Silver Fox, a young Cyclops, and a variety of other young mutants, spotted by ability.
There’s a lot running around to get to the expected outcome; Logan/Wolverine leaves the merc crew, Victor/Sabretooth hunts down other members over the years, Stryker re-recruits Wolverine to hunt down Sabretooth, giving him an adamantium skeleton in the process.
If you’ve seen the previous films or read the comics, you know where the film is going; why Wolverine seems to dance around the fact that Stryker is the real bad guy I do not know. On top of the fact that we know they survive to make the other films, as Wolverine and Sabretooth are virtually unkillable there’s little suspense in watching them fight. Especially when they’re fighting each other (something also noted in The Spirit).
Jackman carries the film as Wolverine, just as did for the previous films; Schreiber makes for a surprisingly good Sabretooth, in an antagonistic-brother role that’s incredibly similar to his work in Defiance. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, mostly because we don’t spend enough time with them. Reynolds is a lot of fun as Deadpool, but the character is absolutely wasted, disappearing fifteen minutes into the film.
Taylor Kitsch, as Gambit, fails to make much of an impression. Many X-Men fans despise the character, but I’ve always liked Gambit – especially in the early 90’s animated TV show, which got him just right. The portrayal here was a letdown.
Most of the film looks great, and I particularly appreciated the title sequence, a montage of Victor and Logan fighting in US wars throughout the past 150 years, which has some usually vivid flavor. Despite the brief feel for these periods, however, the film has absolutely no period flavor for the 1970’s, during which it’s actually set.
The CGI effects work is unusually subpar: even a simple shot of a plane flying above the clouds (which, as an aside, is used far too often in today’s films to convey travel – I’d rather see the old dotted line on a map) looks distractingly digital.
Where does Wolverine stand among the recent surge in comic book adaptations? It’s no Dark Knight, which Hood seems to be going for, nor is it a Ghost Rider, which the script leans to. It’s on the same level as, say, Ang Lee’s Hulk, a fun but undeniably flawed film in which the aspirations of the director are in direct contrast with the source material.
But I was glad to see those aspirations, even if the film doesn’t really work; at least this isn’t an unimaginative, workmanlike effort like Ratner’s X-Men film, or Tim Story’s Fantastic Four flicks.
Wolverine is a huge improvement over Ratner’s film, and fans should be satisfied, though it doesn’t quite match Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X2. For a film I could feel wasn’t working as I was watching it, I enjoyed Wolverine as much as possible.
Stick around after the credits for an additional scene.
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