Wolverine is one of the most beloved of X-Men characters, and so it was no particular surprise that Wolverine was chosen as the first X-Men character to get the Origins treatment. Of course, there’s a simple problem with this: there are multiple versions of Wolverine’s backstory, each of which has been modified, ret-conned and airbrushed over the years. So which origin story did the writers go with?
None of them. Or all of them. They threw ‘em all into a blender and decided that whatever came out was what they’d use. The result is an absolute disaster.
This shouldn’t be a surprise given the now legendary conflicts behind the scenes during the creation of the movie. It seems no one really knew what kind of movie this was going to be. Perhaps those greenlighting the movie didn’t realize that a good bit of Wolverine’s origin happened in the 19th century. Can you imagine their shock when they see the first half-hour of this movie?
To be fair, the movie begins well enough. I’m not going to go into details, but let’s just say that the movie captures a little bit of the period and is actually somewhat believable, if a bit cliche. Then again, Wolverine’s origins (like nearly all X-Men characters) is a bit cliche. Once the movie moves out of the past, fast fowarding into the future, it begins to lose its way.
The movie suffers from an overwhelming number of mutants we all feel we should know, but never are given the opportunity to even attach names to. They come, they go. The list of recognizable mutants making appearances here would be exhausting to assemble: Gambit, Deadpool, Cyclops, Emma Frost, and at the end, Charles Xavier himself. Most of the appearances are unnecessary and short. Even Gambit, who plays a pivotal role in the last half of the film, gets short shrift. You know nothing about him, and for the uninitiated it’s difficult to even know what his power is. Since he’s given so little screen time, you begin to wonder why you should care at all.
Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool and Dominic Monaghan’s Bolt get top billing, but Reynolds gets no more than a few moments of screen time, and Monaghan (and I’m serious about this) gets even less. When Reynolds returns for the final, pivotal (and absolutely ludicrous) final battle, it’s mostly his stunt double we see.
Storywise, the movie tries to weave a coherent plot, but really ends up being little more than set piece battles, each of which is decidedly less well done than the previous. By the final battle, you’re wondering how low the budget must have gotten, because the special effects are atrocious. It happens (for some unknown reason) at the top of a cooling tower at Three Mile Island. The effects are so cartoonish that they are reminiscent of the flying special effects in Matrix Revolutions. Yes, they’re that bad. Except unlike the final Matrix movie, the effects spread far beyond plastic-looking main characters to the entire environment around them. It is obvious they were racing toward the finish line with no money left, and just wanted the damned movie done. It shows in every frame.
The Three Mile Island bit raises another question, of course. The latest parts of the movie are obviously supposed to have happened in the late 70s, early 80s. But the movie is so bad at telegraphing the time period (at least after the first half hour) that it is difficult to know exactly when the movie is taking place. The computer technology looks better than what we have now, and yet this is all supposed to be in the past. The movie makes no effort to root the viewer in the time period.
Wolverine’s chief antagonist, Sabertooth (played well enough by Liev Schreiber), never has a believable motivation, and his actions are seemingly random and never very interesting. Schreiber gives the character some charisma on screen, but he’s never given anything interesting to do or say. The same goes for Jackman’s Wolverine. Hugh Jackman is Wolverine. He’s precisely the right actor for the part, but the writers never give him anything worthwhile to do other than to stand around and brood, or fight. Moments of true emotion are rare, and when they do appear tend to be cartoonish to the point of laughter.
In the end, this movie is pointless. X-Men fans won’t be happy with the liberties taken with the origin story itself, and will be disappointed in how the thing is put together. Action fans might find some few moments of enjoyment in the fight scenes, but not as much as they might hope for in a summer blockbuster. They’ll find themselves bored, if not outright rolling their eyes at the dated effects.
In short: don’t waste your time with this. It’s bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.