Mini Review - Logan

Wolverine has been regarded as one of the most popular X-men, he’s shown up in almost every X-men movie in one way or another, and has been the main character in the vast majority of them. That’s a testament to Hugh Jackman who elevated this character beyond his comic book popularity, to the fact that whilst Fantastic 4’s future in comics went into doubt after Secret Wars, the X-men survived and recently Wolverine was brought back into the fray in the Marvel Legacy title.

Logan, Jackman’s final performance as Wolverine is based on a comic book Old Man Logan, I have not read the comic book but I know it has a following, with him replacing Wolverine in certain X-men titles and having a steady performing solo book.

With the success of Deadpool, Fox knew that an R-rated comic book movie could be successful and given Wolverine’s powers and history, an R-rated movie was ripe for him. Of course, they want to mitigate the risk, the budget for this movie was $96m, about half what the budget of your average superhero blockbuster. It was very successful, earning $616.8m at the box office and having a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes

X-men Month: TV Retrospective - Wolverine and the X-men

We finish X-men month with a look at the most recent of the X-men animated series: Wolverine and the X-men

Released in 2009, this series was a kind of bridge between the X-men movies and the comics universe. There isn’t a lot of shared continuity between the movies and this comics, it’s more about design choices (Wolverine particularly looks like his Hugh Jackman counterpart and considerably taller than his comic counterpart)

Heralding this is a focus on Wolverine because of his popularity from 3 x-men movies and a solo movie coming out the same year. So, is it any good? Let’s take a look

Guilty Pleasures #27 - X-men Month - X-men: Days of Future Past

We’ve reached the conclusion of Hugh Jackm… I mean X-men month with the most recent X-men movie on DVD, it’s X-men: Days of Future Past. And helping things along is the return of Bryan Singer as director, his last X-men film was the best of the ones so far, being X-men 2.

I must admit, like the other X-men movies, I didn’t see this in the cinema, seeing a teaser for it as a mid-credits scene in the Amazing Spider-man 2 (Mark Webb was under contract with Fox at the time, but was allowed to work on this film in exchange for that) kinda rubbed me the wrong way at the time, instead I waited until it was out on DVD.

In terms of audience reaction, it’s probably got the best up there with 91% on Rotten Tomatoes (at time of writing matching Captain America: Civil war and up there with the Dark Knight and the Avengers, 2 of my absolute favourite movies. Oh and also Iron Man, which was good… I need to do a Marvel theme month, I mean actual Marvel, not Fox or Sony Marvel.

Anyway, it’s also the most successful of the X-men movies, earning $750m at the box office on a $200m budget.

But let’s take a look at the movie itself and see how it holds up. For the record I’m not using the extended version because I don’t have that DVD.

X-men Month - Mini Review: The Wolverine

The Wolverine was the 2013 entry and the x-men franchise and served as a kind of filler event between first class and 2014’s X-men: Days of Future Past (we’ll get to that next week) production began immediately after the release of X-men origins wolverine and it went through several drafts and directors as is not unusual for the X-men movies to do.

Produced on $120m budget, this movie had a decent run with around $420m at the box office and was better received critically than its predecessor with a 70% rating on rotten tomatoes and a 6.7 on IMDb.

What are my thoughts on the movie? Let’s dive in.

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.

X-men Month - Mini Review: X-men: The Last Stand

And so we have come to the third entry to the Franchise and possibly one of the more infamous ones. X-men: The Last Stand was released in 2006 and it had a hell of a production history. Bryan Singer, who had directed the first two movies left to direct Superman returns instead… You’d think that’d be the obvious way to go but Superman returns received a mixed reception and made less money than this movie.

Beyond that, the main actors were only contracted for 2 films, so their contracts had to be renewed, for Hugh Jackman that meant getting director approval. Matthew Vaughn was assigned to direct when they entered pre-production but family issues meant he departed before filming started. In the end they hired Brett Ratner, who really didn’t know a lot about the X-men.

In the writing department we have Simon Kinberg, who at that point had written Fantastic 4 and Elektra… Be afraid…

And of course we have studio interference as well, with a lot of the original elements for Jean Grey’s role ordered to be cut down because it was considered too dark for a summer blockbuster. They also killed for major character deaths and I’ll get to that in the story section.

Which is right now, so take a look at X-men 3

X-men Month - Mini Review: X-men 2 (X2: X-men United)

We rejoin the action in X-men month

X-men was both critically and commercially successful so a sequel was inevitable, but it took its sweet ass time getting to us, it was May 2003 before the sequel aired. The script underwent various rewrites (and I’m taking my info from Wikipedia so make of it what you will) cutting out minor characters (Angel and Beast were supposed to appear) and giving Storm more screen time after Halle Berry’s success in Monster’s Ball, which won her an academy award, can we retroactively take that back after Catwoman?

  

Relax! I’m kidding. Released in May 2003 on a $110 million budget it managed to score around $410m, another tidy profit for Fox and enough that they continue the franchise in a third movie which I’ll cover later this week. It met with positive reviews with a 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and an average 7.5/10 on IMDb, both improvements over the first one. But let’s take a look for ourselves.

X-men Month - Mini Review: X-men

It’s July, you know what that means, X-men month

Yes, I have to start by apologising that this will be almost entirely be mini reviews. I thought I might have been able to get a rage out of 3 and Origins: Wolverine but the truth is I kinda liked them and I’m not sure there’s any ground other reviewers haven’t already established. That’s not to say they’re not flawed (in many very obvious ways) but that’s for those reviews.

Just FYI, despite the X-men cameos, I’m not covering Deadpool. But if you’d like my views them I’ll briefly say overall, I enjoyed the film but it was very much what I expected out of the film and not much more. Kudos to the marketing department for helping make it a massive success.

I’m also not covering Apocalypse. I’m writing this in April, in fact 2 weeks after I should’ve done it really so I’ve not got the time to be covering a movie not even out yet.

Also, also, there will be a 4 issue test of Power Man and Iron Fist coming out this month, I know it’s late since #4 was out in May but I haven’t had anywhere else to put it. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at X-men

#33 - Superhero Movie

I love Superhero Movies. They’re my favourite genre of movie and it’s almost guaranteed these days that I’ll watch a Superhero Movie. (A few indie films notwithstanding) but I won’t deny that they can be formulaic. There’s plenty of clichés that come with superheroes that make the genre perfect for parody, here’s a guide of how not to do it.

Superhero Movie is another of those ‘movie movies’ that “satirises” popular movies in a particular genre. The most popular is the ‘Scary Movie’ which has spawned a fluttering of sequels. The basic formula is sadly a bunch of references with little to no effort. And whilst I’m not above making references myself

  

Epic Movie particularly has them ad-nauseam.  How bad is this one? Let’s dig in