I could spend hours poking and picking at the things they changed from the comic book continuity I grew up on and loved. I could lament the lack of some of my favorite story bits and the light touch they gave others.
I could do all that, but, when it comes to X-Men Origins: Wolverine I don’t have to dig that deep to dislike the film.
Stepping away from my fanboy roots, forgetting how much I love the Wolverine from the 80s and early 90s (before Marvel really went wild with their continuity switching), this film is still quite flawed.
First and foremost, the pacing is all wrong. There are good parts in this film–the fight scenes are generally OK and the relationship between Logan and Silverfox plays very well and John Wraith is a good supporting character–but as a whole it’s all stops and starts, jarring transitions that interrupt the flow of what story there is and just don’t hold together.
Part of this, I’m sure, is due to a lack of coherent story to begin with. Writers David Benioff and Skip Woods don’t seem to have meshed well as a team on this project. Looking at their credits, I’m betting I could pick the bits that each wrote (Benioff, coming off The Kite Runner, I’m sure is responsible for some of the deeper stuff I liked in the film; Woods, with Swordfish under his belt, I’m sure I can clearly blame for the lack of depth in a number of characters).
The plot comes across as disjointed vignettes, the only common thread being the main character. Oh, they try to fill it up with “very important information” but fail at nearly every turn by shoving that information at us in the most bland, heavy-handed and over-used ways possible. How do we know this character is the bad guy? Mostly because of his sneer, and the standard “bad guy” camera angles chosen, and the tacky (and over-used) dialog he spouts. And that can be said about most of the “bad guy” characters in this film.
There is no shortage of material to pick from in the Wolverine stable of comic book history. Instead of mining that rich field, the writers instead opted to pull in the most generic of plot bits and haphazardly place them together with little attention to detail and little thought as to the coherence of the whole. “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…?” seems to be the main driving force behind most of the scenes as they made it into the final film.
Getting past the poor pacing and sub-par writing, the next most notable thing is the bad effects. Not all of the effects are bad–Wolverine’s healing ability is wonderfully illustrated in a semi-subtle way, the explosions look good and, more than a couple of times, there’s some neat illustrations of powers (Gambit’s charged cards, Wraith’s teleportation)–but perhaps the most important effects in the film look unfinished and out of place. Those most important effects? Wolverine’s claws. They don’t match the lighting in the scenes, they don’t sit properly on his hands half the time and they just look plain fake. The presentation in the X-Men movies were infinitely better done. And there’s just no excuse for that.
Some of the plot and effects issues I’ll blame on the film’s PG-13 rating. Wolverine isn’t really a PG-13 character when you get right down to it. The simple fact that no matter how deep his claws have been sunk into someone there’s never any blood on them is just another poke int he eye of suspension of disbelief. Also of note: for as often as Wolverine has that cigar between his teeth, it’s never, ever, lit. Why? Because for some reason you can’t have your hero smoking and still get a PG-13 rating.
This film was full of missed opportunities and wasted characters. It threw away a fantastic lead in from the third X-Men film and instead gave us a mis-matched bunch of uneven scenes that, on their own, could sometimes be good. That just added to the frustration and disappointment of the finished product.
Now, there are people who will enjoy this film. More power to them. With more action, it could be great popcorn flick. As it stands now, it is, at best, mediocre in that category due to the action being interrupted too often by poor attempts at story.
I say skip it until it hits video and cable. But if you do go, stay until after the end credits roll–while the “extra” bit I saw was quite anti-climactic and disappointing, I hear there’s at least one better showing in some theaters and maybe as many as four variations total.
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