In some post I can’t be bothered to link to, I pointed out that all week I am going to be re-watching and reviewing the X-Movies, so now you know what this is and here we go. Oh, and this assumes you have seen them before, so SPOILERS. Oh 2, I’m going to breeze through this one, especially since it sucks:
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
My enduring memory of this was pretty bad, so I was interested to see if perhaps I was being a little unfair and if memory and reality would end up being in conflict.
Nope. It really is as a bad as I remembered. I don’t even know where to begin. Even if you ignore the cringe-inducing dialogue, terrible story and ham-fisted attempts to cram in mutants who don’t belong in the story and instead focus on the awesome action setpieces …
Whatever, dude
… well, they’re not that awesome. They’re kind of stupid, actually, and the dodgy special effects make them even worse. Wolvie versus the chopper? Could have been cool, but is instead filled with stupid. Wolvie vs. Deadpool on top of Three Mile Island? Just dreadful. Logan boxing with the Blob? Silly, and not in a good way.
Plus so many awful cliches. The kindly old couple who take the hero in because he reminds them of their son. The woman who faked being in a relationship with the lead in order to betray him, but wait, no, she actually had true feelings for him all along! The “my loved one is dead, oops, guess she’s not dead after all” cliche. My brother is my enemy. The “someone is hunting down the old team” cliche. Father sacrifices his son for some misguided greater purpose. Etc etc. etc. etc.
Jeez!!!
It’s like they filled out a bunch of flashcards with bad movie cliches, shuffled them up, drew seven or eight of them, and wrote the script.
This movie is bad.
What the fuck?
It occurred to me while watching it that chronological was not the best choice for this X marathon. From a storytelling perspective, this should be viewed after X2, when you finally get a real glimpse into Wolvie’s mysterious past. Only then should you reveal his origin. It plays better if, when you initially meet him in the first X flick, you don’t know the details of that past.
On the same token, structurally, this movie botched it by telling the story in a linear fashion. Leading with the flashback to childhood, yes. Going through all the wars and showing the Vietnam stuff, no.
The story would have been FAR better served if we went from childhood to Logan in Canada living in peace. Stryker would show up as some mysterious (to the audience) dude talking about events we didn’t yet know about. That would have been intriguing. Then Logan’s girl gets killed and Victor shows up. Over the course of the movie we see all the past wars and ‘Nam and all that, dropped into appropriate spots. It would have played much better if that stuff was initially a puzzle for the audience to riddle out.
Granted, wouldn’t have fixed the shitty dialogue and nonsensical action.
So basically, it would have sucked anyway.
And MAN, it sucked.
