X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The first movie of the summer always has a lot riding on it. I feel like it can set the tone for the summer. Plus, after Iron Man's surprise success last year, there is more pressure on the first movie out. This year's lead off man, Wolverine, has not been without problems. Behind the scenes issues between the director and the producers led to reshoots and the belief that Gavin Hood (The director) was not happy with the final product. Then an unfinished version of the movie leaked on-line and was watched by thousands of people. And to top it off, opening weekend had to contend with the swine flu and less than stellar(Read: pretty bad) reviews. Through it all, Wolverine took $85 million opening weekend and put all of those bad things behind it. I was very excited for the movie at one point and then not so excited at another point and then eventually I just wanted to stop seeing television spots for it. So it is with all of that in my head that I sat down and watched 2009's first summer movie.

Somewhere in the woods of Canada a young boy is sick and another young boy watches over him. Then without much warning, there is a gun shot and the sick young boy sprouts claws of bone from his hands and he kills a man. The man was his father, somehow, and then the two boys run off. Over the years they fight in 3 wars(Civil, WW1, WW2) and in Vietnam. They fight for America, even though they are Canadian. Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Victor(Liev Schreiber) are the two men and they are mutants who heal too quickly to be killed and they grow claws. Enter, William Stryker(Danny Houston) with a team of mutants who believe they are doing good work for America. The team is comprised of mutants with various powers, but Logan realizes they are not actually doing good work and he leaves to become a lumberjack and live a quiet life with a school teacher girlfriend. Years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds later(not sure which) the mutant team is being killed and Logan has been warned. However, after his girlfriend is killed he goes back with Stryker to become even more invincible to kill Victor, who killed his girlfriend. Logan gets his body full of Adamantium(a metal from a meteor) and now Logan is Wolverine. It turns out Stryker is trying to create the ultimate mutant killing machine and Logan turns on him.

If it sounds a bit confusing, have no fear, it is a bit confusing. It is confusing because none of the story is flushed out. We meet mutants for brief moments in time and then they are gone before we care. We get Wade Wilson(Ryan Reynolds) for an awesome opening sequence and then he is gone, only to reappear as a version of Deadpool, briefly. We get Gambit(Taylor Kitch) in a somewhaty supporting role, but he is there only because the fans wanted him. he serves no real purpose as Gambit. The Blob, Bolt, Silverfox, Cyclops, Kestrel, and Emma Frost are all mutants who make appearances, but unless you are a fan you won't care and if you are a fan, you will wonder why they are all crammed in. The main story of the show is similar to the television show Heroes, where mutants are being captured and held and the island where they are being kept acts as a pretty cool set piece for the big explosive finale. But as the mutants start dying, it is hard to muster too much sympathy because we have no spent any time with any of them. They are killed merely to move the story to where it needs to go.

That being said, I really enjoyed the performances. Jackman continues to make a great Logan and he is suffiently bad ass here. He is also JACKED out of his mind. The muscles, the definition and the overall tone of Jackman's body is ridiculous and exactly how I pictured Wolverine. He has the right growl and attitude as a younger Logan. Schreiber's Victor is a nasty vampire style mutant and Schreiber is relishing the oppurtunity to really let loose and have some fun. The CGI lets Schreiber down a bit as some of his animal style moves look too corny, but his performance is vicious. Ryan Reynolds is the perfect Wade Wilson, but that should come as no surprise to anyone. No actors capture snark the way Reynolds does. Kitch is a star in the making and while his Cajun accent is a little too Texas, I feel he got the chracter is Gambit as much as he could given the little screen time he had. He is a charasmatic young actor and if Gambit should be blessed with his own movie, I believe Kitch could carry it. Houston's Stryker is exactly what it needed to be. Houston has long been a great character actor, liek Brian Cox, so it is fitting that Stryker will later be Brian Cox.

This is a big summer movie, so the fights and explosions are important and they do not really diappoint. I like watching fights between two guys who do not die because they can have the craziest things happen and that is the case in Wolverine. The fights between Victor and Logan are very cool and the effects are pretty good. The helicopter explosion would have been better if it was not used in the trailer (Also, best stunt in movie used in trailer, NOT COOL!). Gambit's exploding card CGI was very impressive and the fight between Gambit and Logan, while pointless was cool. Also, the big three way fight at the end was cool looking and led to some nice CGIed building collapse effect. There is also a kind of funny fight between Blob and Logan that is cool. However, the first real action sequence is freaking dope! Team X overtakes a building surrounded by guys with guns and it is awesome. Agent Zero's excellent marksmanship gets used to perfection and then Wade's sword skills make for the most exciting thing in the movie. Again, the best part was in the trailer, but the whole sequence offers serious bad-assery! And he sums it up in perfectly droll delivery of "people are dead." Ryan Reynolds, OWNS!

Wolverine is very much a mixed bag. The story is jumpy, incomplete and often times incoherent. The CGI goes from awesome(The Deadpool fight) to offensively bad(Kids running in air on the green screen). Gavin Hood is a director with an intense point of view (see:Tsotsi), but this movie has no focus. Things are missing from the story to make it logcial, scenes seem unfinished and the movie feels slapped together, which it should not be considering they have known this was the release date for over a year. We are told certain things and just have to believe them (Bullets made of Adamantium will cause Logan to lose memory, huh??), so the script seems very messy. It is a shame some great performances are wasted. When the movie was over I thought it was good, but not great. However, the further away from it I get, the less I liked it. I had long said the movie just had to be better than X3:The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine is better than X3, but not by much. The most I can hope for is that the spin-offs will be better. But how good can a spin-off to a spin-off be?

Final Grade: C-