Critics' Reviews: Discussion

[BMM]

Minneapolis Star Tribune

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/movies/44068062.html?page=2&c=y

Movie review: X misses the spot with 'Wolverine'
The prequel that promised insight into the tortured mutant isn't up to scratch.

By Colin Covert, Star Tribune

★ out of four stars

A crude blunderbuss of a superhero movie, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" proves that the greatest supervillains confronting Marvel Comics' shape-shifters, lycanthropes and mind-readers are clumsy directors and sloppy screenwriters.

After a promising start with two thought-provoking films by Bryan Singer that cast the alienated mutants as members of a tragically despised minority, the franchise detoured into demolition-derby excess in the heavy hands of "Rush Hour" director Brett Ratner. Now Hugh Jackman's spinoff proves that the series had a lot farther to fall. And it lands with a clunk loud enough to shatter Adamantium.

This is a popcorn movie with no pop, a routine expedition through comic book clichés, a return to what most superhero movies were before "Spider-Man," "The Dark Knight" and "Iron Man" elevated our expectations.

After a thrilling title sequence establishing the origins of half-brothers Wolverine (Jackman) and Sabertooth (Liev Schreiber) and following them through tours in every major U.S. war through Vietnam, we have a clear understanding of their back story. Wolverine is more man than beast, a fearsome fighting machine but one that knows the meaning of mercy.

Sabertooth has given in to the animal.

Recruited into a special forces military unit led by sneering Maj. William Stryker (Danny Huston), Wolverine goes AWOL for a quiet life of lumberjacking in backwoods Canada. He doesn't like to dwell on the sins of the past, evasively telling his gentle schoolteacher love Kayla (Lynn Collins), "I'm the best there is at what I do, and what I do isn't very nice." Naturally, the sinister Stryker isn't content to lose one of his superhuman Dirty Dozen, and Wolverine is soon up to his chiseled pectorals in exploding helicopters, collapsing walls and crashing Humvees.

Lollapalooza action sequences are often called showstoppers, but never has the term been so apt. The repeated (and repeated and repeated) rumbles between scowling Wolverine and snarling Sabertooth are loud and fierce but anticlimactic. Each is invulnerable and heals instantly after any trauma; after all these years of sibling rivalry, haven't they figured out they can't hurt each other?

The special effects are routine, in fact subpar for a $100 million movie. The best effect is probably Jackman's Olympian physique, displayed in a "Die Hard" sleeveless T-shirt (or less) whenever possible. His lean torso contrasts nicely with Schreiber's bearlike bulk; just as in TV wrestling, the bodies instantly tell us who's the hero and who's the heel. A film that concentrated on their superhuman sibling rivalry might have held our attention, but "Wolverine" piles in so many extraneous X-Men, Women and Kids that the story feels like roll call at a comic book convention.

If you don't already have a deep fanboy emotional investment in Vanishing Guy, Electricity Guy, Card-Throwing Guy, Ninja Guy and Sharpshooter Guy, there's not much here to make you care. Their main mutant quality appears to be personality-deficit disorder. You can draw a big X through this one.

 

[Dark Victory]

BB was about Batman, TDK was about Joker.

 

[chaseter]

That is like saying this movie is about Sabretooth

 

[BMM]

Dallas Morning News--C-

http://www.guidelive.com/portal/page?_pageid=33,97283&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&item_id=72920

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
By TOM MAURSTAD / Media Critic

X-Men Origins: Wolverine may be opening during the first weekend of May, but it is the first big, flashy movie of summer, with all the attendant hype and expectation.

So there's no easy way to say this. Oh wait, yes there is: Wolverine stinks.

There may be a little more to it than that, but not much, and what a wasteful shame. Wolverine, as any comic fan knows, is the breakout star of the cluster of superheroes that over the decades have operated under the brand name X-Men. (Can you imagine a movie spotlighting Cyclops – yawn – or Nightcrawler? Ugh.) And in Hugh Jackman, Hollywood found the perfect actor to personify the comic-book legend.

But as the movie drones on, it becomes obvious that those were the only two things that this movie got right. These origin-styled sequels have become Hollywood's go-to strategy for rebooting a flagging franchise, but somewhere in all the frantic, furious scheming over this special-effects sequence and that billowing-fireballs action scene, director Gavin Hood and screenwriters David Benioff and Skip Woods forgot to come up with a decent story.

The movie opens promisingly enough, establishing pre-Wolverine Logan's background as a strange half-animal mutant boy with his similarly lupine brother, Victor (Liev Schreiber), his only comfort and companion. There's a cool montage of wartime exploits that grow increasingly savage as the all-but-indestructible brothers romp through the Civil War, the world wars and finally, Vietnam. The older Victor gets, the more he embraces his animal savagery, while Logan struggles to hold on to his humanity. The seeds of their split are planted.

In comes the military-industrial complex in the form of Col. William Stryker (Danny Huston lamentably replacing the more coolly evil Brian Cox), who assembles a team of mutants for some supersecret project that involves wanton butchery of unfortunate locals. Logan can't stand any more and retires to the lumberjack life in Canada. But through a whirl of locations and eye-candy action sequences, he is drawn back into this conspiracy of violence and technology (the point of which is never made clear) and becomes – da-da-da dah! – Wolverine.

The problems with this movie can be boiled down to this: too much and not enough. Too much of the superheroes and the superpowers and the tag-team of celebrities playing them – hey, there's Will.i.am as the invisi-dude John Wraith, and there's Friday Night Lights hunk Taylor Kitsch as riverboat gambler mutant Gambit – and not enough coherent storytelling or meaningful character development or exploration. This movie takes time to stage a boxing match between Wolverine and a grossly obese mutant ex-soldier that goes nowhere and does nothing but provide several million dollars worth of spectacle, but it can't take the time to explain what everybody (or anybody) is going on (and on) about.

 

[Dark Victory]

^Yeah, but you could definitely say Bale got less screen time to focus on other characters.

 

[BMM]

Arizona Republic 3/5 stars

'Wolverine'
by Bill Goodykoontz - Apr. 30, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

Gavin Hood, director of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" was understandably upset when an uncompleted version of the film was leaked online weeks before the release date.

The leak raised legitimate concerns about piracy and its effects, as well as the perils of evaluating a work still in progress. (I did not see the leaked movie.)

Ironic, then, that the final version of the film seems unfinished. A mix of solid action and an underused cast, with star Hugh Jackman left shouldering the burden of bad lines and forced emotion, it leaves you longing for more editing and a tighter story.
Jackman, reprising his role from the "X-Men" trilogy as the title character, remains a good fit in this prequel. Athletic and graceful, he moves with a confidence befitting a mutant whose remarkable healing powers have seen him through several wars. Jackman's physicality is Wolverine's strength; his emoting, not so much.

Still, Jackman, ever game, does what he can. As with any origin story, there's a lot of ground to cover in a relatively short time.

But what's really needed here is more screen time for the likes of Taylor Kitsch as Gambit and, especially, Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. The latter is particularly good; the only things faster than his mouth are his hands when they have swords in them. Seen early in the film almost singlehandedly defeating a small army of thugs (including slicing a bullet in half in midair; neat trick), Deadpool would be a great soldier if he could just shut up, says his commander, Col. Stryker (Danny Huston).

Unfortunately, Hood and writers David Benioff and Skip Woods make him do exactly that: The character disappears until . . . well, let's just say a lot later.

The film begins in the 19th century with Logan, the man who will become Wolverine, as a sickly boy. A family tragedy - that's putting it mildly - lands him on the lam with his older brother, Victor. Hood morphs the two from an escape through the woods to various battlefields in history, until they're court-martialed and executed. Except, the execution doesn't take.

Stryker recruits Logan and Victor, now played by Liev Schreiber, for an elite task force with various powers. Victor, for instance, has long nails, fangs and a bad attitude. Logan, of course, has retractable claws. Victor has more of a taste for this kind of mercenary work than does his brother, so, after a particularly unpleasant mission, Logan quits the business and takes up working as a logger in his native Canada and living with Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins).

This blissful life is interrupted when former members of the team turn up dead. Stryker comes calling and, in a more eventful way, so does Victor. (Cue Jackman's emoting.)

Fueled by revenge, Logan agrees to allow Stryker to perform a procedure on him as part of the Weapon X program, which will make him practically indestructible - a choice about which Stryker quickly has second thoughts.

This all leads to a conspiracy involving other mutants that shouldn't be revealed, not because it would spoil things but because it would just confuse them. After far too many last-second, out-of-the-blue rescues, Logan has fully inhabited the Wolverine character and, either by a neat trick or by a cheat, depending on your point of view, whether all this aligns with your idea of his backstory won't really matter.

While packed with effects and action, without the attention to story and emotional investment present in such films as "The Dark Knight" and "Ironman," "Wolverine" ultimately doesn't rise above its comic-book roots. For the fanboy, that may be fine. For the rest of us, it's not quite enough/

 

[BMM]

Toronto Star--2 1/2 (out of 4)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: A hairy, Canuck Obama?

Peter Howell
Movie Critic

Starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Ryan Reynolds and Lynn Collins. Directed by Gavin Hood. 107 minutes. At major theatres, midnight screenings start tonight.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, Virginia, there is a sanity claws.

Let geeks and lawyers scratch their eyes out over whether the official X-Men Origins: Wolverine arriving at theatres tonight is substantially different from the advance print leaked to the Internet.

Both prints reportedly clock in at 107 minutes, so draw your own conclusions. But a far more intelligent and worthwhile pursuit is to view this otherwise silly and slap-happy superhero saga as a metaphor for the ongoing power shift stateside from the Bush/Cheney hawks to the Obama doves. It will help those 107 minutes pass swiftly and keep brain cells from dying.

You've got your Bush/Cheney cabal in the teaming of Liev Schreiber's unstable brute Victor, a.k.a. Sabretooth, with Danny Huston's controlling Gen. William Stryker, military fascist and mad scientist.

They're the teeth of Team X, a Machiavellian corps of U.S. mutant thugs who bust heads internationally, and who aren't above torture, rape and murder. Anything goes, Stryker says, because, "Your country needs you."

Where have we heard that before?

Opposing them in the slow-boiling Obama style is Hugh Jackman's peace-loving Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine, a hairy guy of mythic origin from the Northwest Territories (erroneously named as such in a prologue set in 1845, before the N.W.T. officially existed). He opposes violence ("I'm Canadian") and will resort to it only in times of war or when his brother Victor/Sabretooth gets him really, really angry.

There's more – Logan's six-year sojourn lumberjacking in the Canadian woods matches Obama's six years in the Illinois Senate – but let's cut to the chase and say that there are a lot of chases in Wolverine, all of them digitally tarted up to the wazoo and making no sense whatever for people not suffering from ADD. One minute Wolvie is "indestructible," the next he's being flattened by obese wrestlers, rolling logs and crumbling nuclear plants.

The film has the Achilles' heel common to most superhero origin tales, this one coming as a prequel to three earlier and superior X-Men movies (yes, X-Men: The Last Stand, too).

So much time is expended on the origin part that there's not much left by way of saving the planet from the bad guy du jour. And much of the origin tale is a hodgepodge of superhero and horror tropes.

What's missing is the humour that enlivens the better Marvel Comics adaptations, notably Spider-Man and Iron Man. Canada's own Ryan Reynolds does his best to inject some laughs in his role as Team X motormouth Wade Wilson, but let's just say that events conspire to zipper his lips. Too bad, because he's never been better.

Also MIA is the feminine strength that helps keep the testosterone from splashing over the sides. There's just one woman of note in the film, Lynn Collins' Kayla Silverfox, girlfriend to Logan, and she's reduced to damsel-in-distress patronizing.

But at least she has a role integral to the plot, unlike Taylor Kitsch's card-playing mutant Remy LeBeau, a.k.a. Gambit, who has been airbrushed into the film to satisfy geeks, along with other extraneous mutants who will show up in larger roles in later films, ho-hum. (Geek alert: stay until the very end of the credits.)

The whole thing would collapse under the weight of its own pretensions were it not for the considerable acting prowess of Jackman and Schreiber, who know how to give good growl. They know they're in a comic book movie, but they act like they're making Apocalypse Now, and God bless 'em for it.

And the film's Bush/Cheney vs. Obama dynamics are surely not lost on either of them.

 

[Kargo Warrior]

It's down to 36% and falling...abysmal reviews.

 

[chaseter]

Dayum it is now in the 30's

 

[magus]

44% on RT and climbing ...Dude I just did RT best Marvel Films, and if you guys think this film is bad...just remember the Fantastic Four that was made in 1994. Lol...that was horrible...I don't care what you think. And all these modern movie are 100% better then that the captain america film and the first punisher film.

At least Captain American is watchable under the influence of alcohol and for the purposes of mockery. Wolverine is so mediocre that I wouldn't bother.

 

[magus]

It's down to 36% and falling...abysmal reviews.

Thank God.

 

[Dark Victory]

Nice to see this getting bad reviews. I would for this bomb to really teach Fox a lesson, but sadly it won't happen.

 

[craigdbfan]

At times like this I wish Peter McCabe was still around, I'd like to read his response to the incredible 37% on RT.

 

[Chewy]

peace-loving Logan

The fact that this can be said in regards to this movie and be 100% right is the saddest part of this whole mess

 

[chaseter]

At times like this I wish Peter McCabe was still around, I'd like to read his response to the incredible 37% on RT.

I am sad that he won't be able to hold up our second week box office bet and have to put in his sig "Chaseter was right."

 

[RoboAmish]

It's down to 36% and falling...abysmal reviews.

Funny stuff

 

[magus]

At times like this I wish Peter McCabe was still around, I'd like to read his response to the incredible 37% on RT.

He's probably too busy figuring out a way to justify it along with studying each frame so he can point out how seeing an extra .0003 seconds of Wade Wilson constitutes the leak not being the same as the "film".

 

[night0205]

So to you all that have seen it do you think it's so bad it belongs below (theatrical) Daredevil, X3, well maybe even F4 2...? Or do you think that back then, people didn't have the standard for a good comic book movie that IM and TDK has set?

 

[chaseter]

It isn't comparing it to TDK and IM, it is comparing it to what we have already gotten in the X-Men franchise and this is a big step further down the hill. This is no where near as good as X2 was, this is worse than X1, and IMO I enjoyed X3 more than this.

 

[magus]

A movie like Wolverine was passable 10 years ago. Today it is just tired and unacceptable. I liked DD (even the theatrical, though obviously the DVD cut is better) a bit better than this movie. I guess it's better than X3 in some ways, but it is even considerably worse in others.

 

[night0205]

It isn't comparing it to TDK and IM, it is comparing it to what we have already gotten in the X-Men franchise and this is a big step further down the hill. This is no where near as good as X2 was, this is worse than X1, and IMO I enjoyed X3 more than this.

Yeah, but I do think that movies last year, even TIH pushed up the standard of a good comic book movie. Fox just couldn't deliver. I think it's a good thing, because I think Marvel knows that and will fight for that, but Fox is still learning i guess....

Because I think many of the movies that are high up on the list like Spider-man 1 and X-men 1...compared to 2008's summer...they sucked.

 

[lordofthenerds]

It isn't comparing it to TDK and IM, it is comparing it to what we have already gotten in the X-Men franchise and this is a big step further down the hill. This is no where near as good as X2 was, this is worse than X1, and IMO I enjoyed X3 more than this.

Same here. X3 was by no means a good movie, but at least it didn't feature Wolverine and Juggernaut duking it out in a boxing ring.

 

[-Arya-]

I'm glad this movie is tanking in the reviews. Perhaps Fox will now finally stop producing crap. I know..I know... most likely not but I can dream.

 

[night0205]

Everyone just look forward to IRON MAN 2!!!

 

[craigdbfan]

It isn't comparing it to TDK and IM, it is comparing it to what we have already gotten in the X-Men franchise and this is a big step further down the hill. This is no where near as good as X2 was, this is worse than X1, and IMO I enjoyed X3 more than this.

Agreed. I enjoyed X3 a great deal more than Wolverine actually. At least the special effects in Last Stand didn't look so shoddy and just plain lazy.