X-men Month - Mini Review: X-men Origins Wolverine

If there’s one thing everyone knows about Wolverine it’s that he has a mysterious past. He doesn’t remember it and ultimately it’s the key to his character development as he finds out answers piece by piece. Unfortunately, they felt the need to give us an origin story instead.

X-men Origins Wolverine came out in 2009, again, 3 years after the last X-men movie (the Spider-man movies were released in 2002, 2004 and 2007) and despite the large gap, the writing was already underway in 2004. Man, they sure took their time with this one. Gavin Hood was chosen as director despite not being a comic book fan. *sighs* You know, with Brett Ratner he wasn’t a first choice because the actual director had to leave. Here, they deliberately chose a non-comic fan to helm a comic book adaptation. Be afraid

It made money about $370million, but it was blasted by critics holding 38% on Rotten tomatoes, a massive step down from even X-men 3, 6.7 on IMDb and 40% on Metacritic. What do I think? Let’s take a look.

The story starts with Wolverine killing his own father, going out on the run with his half-brother, fighting through several wars, joining a military super-squad helmed by William Stryker, the guy from X-men 2, and quitting it, and all of that in the first 15 minutes of the film. Pacing is kinda erratic is my point.

The meat of the story goeth thusly. Happily retired and with the ‘love of his life,’ Wolverine is undergoing a happy life as a lumberjack but he is pulled back into the old life when former colleague/half-brother Victor Creed aka Sabretooth begins taking out old team members. Needing more to stand up to him, he volunteers to undergo a special treatment to have adamantium bonded to his skeleton but it turns out what he’s really done is allowed Stryker to add his powers to the ‘pool’ to create the ultimate weapon.

So, let’s start with the obvious complaints. Ryan Reynolds does a decent job as mercenary Wade Wilson but then they decide to be complete morons and sew up the mouth of the merc with the mouth, also giving him the ridiculous katanas up his arms and the moronic choice to give him Cyclops’ ridiculously powerful eye blasts (I should’ve brought this up before but Cyclops can blast the roof off a building but can only knock a person back with the same blasts?) this is not Deadpool, no matter what they try and pull you off as, and ending on a teaser that cited his return, not in a million years. Thankfully the reboot material did him justice. Even if the movie itself was relatively unremarkable.

Then we have Gambit, a really cool mutant with a lot of fans relegated to essentially a bit-part in the movie. He could’ve been replaced by anyone with similar results as he was kinda lacking in any personality really. I liked him but he had so little to do it’s a moot point.

Then we have disregard of canon, so let’s ask some easy enough questions. Why doesn’t the facility Wolverine got his powers in look anything like the dam from X-men 2? Why did Victor suddenly decide to join Magneto? And how come he mentioned nothing about the characters’ history together? (Yeah, I know, I criticised this for the first movie but consistency is what I ask for.) How did Stryker get away with all this completely unscathed in the long term? How come Cyclops never mentioned Wolverine rescuing him from Weapon X? How come Wolverine recovered from a bullet wound instantly when in X-men 2 he was knocked out for a couple of minutes?

Then we have my plot-holes such as: how did Professor X find the children? Why did he make telepathic contact to guide the one person who couldn’t see and would least likely be believed? How do bullets somehow erase memories? How can an indestructible bullet penetrate an indestructible shell? If Silverfox could influence people why didn't she influence someone to let her sister go?

You know, Wolverine it’s not easy to make Wolverine, who is practically indestructible, a compelling character. There’s no tension in his action scenes because you know he’ll survive. It’s less of a problem in X-men when there are other characters but here there’s a problem. They try and compensate by giving him more of a character arc in this with the man vs beast part of him at the forefront. The problem is the transitions feel very forced at times and ultimately I don’t think you truly see the savagery of the Wolverine; to do that you’d need more than a PG-13/12 rating.

Also, my god these special effects. Wolverine’s claws look atrocious in this movie, I mean, so terribly fake you’d wonder how that got out. The scene with the ladder was laughable in the same respect.

I’d argue that there is promise in doing an origin story for Wolverine, but unfortunately the previous X-men movies, when they actually decided to stick to canon have backed them into a corner because Logan has to volunteer for the Weapon X experiment (because of a line in X-men 2), which was not so in the comics to my understanding. Unfortunately, this movie is not good, it has some ok moments and does give you the sense of tragedy that a Wolverine story should. However, its plot holes and pacing issues ultimately dig the grave for a good reputation this movie could’ve had.

Rating 35/100

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