Wolverine: Cuts Just Underneath The Bar
C’mon, who wants to try and take the Oscar host gig away from me? I dare ya.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Bring on the over-buttered popcorn, the obscenely large sodas and the amazingly radiated hot dogs…the blockbuster season is upon us! Every summer the world rushes into the theaters daring the movie studios to try their best to blow us out of our seats. CGI masterminds and real life stuntmen pull out all the stops in a yearly effort to make us drop our jaws once more at something we believed we would never see. Amazement and imagination collide inside a brilliant torrent of big-budget action flicks for the next five months and most studios bank their entire year on these “tentpole” films. The money made or lost on these cinematic feats can determine whether a studio will even be in business the following summer. With all that pressure, being the first one out of the gate is a big deal and this year that incredible honor is bestowed upon a familiar face, Wolverine.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine tells of the beginning of one of the most standout characters in the Marvel universe. It follows him from his start as a sickly child though his transformation into one of the world’s most deadly and indestructible killers. It also brings to light his mysterious past in Canada and what made him the missing piece to a terrible and destructive puzzle. Backgrounds and motivations are brought out of the shadows as we delve deeper into the lifeline of this wild and mostly untamed anti-hero.
There was a small rebellion right away when this idea got announced for a Wolverine origin film and the reasoning was some people felt we had already gone down that road in X2. While that is partially true, the secret of this script is it actually tells us more new information on the birth of other characters, letting Wolverine be the lynch pin to bring it all together. Beyond our cigar-smoking hero, we also get the origin story of Sabertooth and Deadpool, which in the end might prove to be the single best thing to come out of this film. Ryan Reynolds, who played Wade (aka Deadpool), has already signed on for a spin-off film surrounding the future of his wise cracking assassin. From the second he was announced as the casting choice fanboys around the world breathed a sigh of relief because they knew they had hit the jackpot. Deadpool is an insanely skilled weapon who never stops talking and cracking jokes, even during the most complicated missions, and that smart-ass nature makes Reynolds that absolute perfect choice for the role. Plus, we had seen him bulk up and take on the comic world before in Blade: Trinity and although the movie itself wasn’t anything to jump and shout about, Reynolds brought some much needed humor to the screen.
Getting back on track with this film, while the storyline of Wolverine might not feel incredibly necessary, the fans can’t seem to get enough of Hugh Jackman playing this iconic comic book role. This film is the fourth time we get to witness him wear the scowl of Wolverine and according to various Hollywood trades it won’t be the last. Making me and scores of other comic book geeks happy, the word has come down that the next Wolverine film will center around his time in Japan, which is a much more interesting storyline than this one.
Following the trend of causing your comic-loving audience to geek out for the sheer joy of it, Wolverine flooded the screen with numerous other characters, which sometimes can be a detriment, like in the original Batman franchise, but Marvel seems to have a slightly better hold on how to approach multi-character films. The most anticipated in this category was certainly Gambit, played by Taylor Kitsch from the TV show Friday Night Lights. I appreciated the physicalization of Gambit and the expression of his powers, but they toned down two of the best parts of who Gambit is, the Cajun accent and his overbearing romantic nature. Admittedly there was no female character for him to draw a bead on, but they could have dropped in at least one line or moment of him making a super-cheesy move on a girl in a bar and watching her melt under his skills. In the comics one of the most memorable things about Gambit is his determined romantic assault on Rogue, which in the X-Men film universe would have to take some clever restructuring since by the end of X-Men: The Last Stand Rogue has given up her powers completely so she can have a real relationship with Bobby Drake (aka Iceman). There were some rumblings about a possible Gambit spin-off as well, but I think his showing in this film wasn’t strong enough to warrant the money and resources, especially not when the Deadpool film is already greenlit and the Magneto script has also already been written (supposedly).
To the other names and faces popping up throughout this film, there was not too much else to get excited about. Will.I.Am, from the music group Black Eyed Peas, did a fine job as the teleporting cowboy, John Wraith, but nothing extraordinary. Dominic Monaghan, who is undoubtedly more connected to Hollywood history than anyone in this film due to his roles in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the TV phenom Lost, played the cool and quiet telekinetic Bolt, but he also felt slightly underused and just there to fill out a head count of comic book archetypes. Without going through the rest name by name, I will leave you with the person I thought was the worst represented, The Blob. No disrespect to the acting talents of Kevin Durand, but the physicalization of The Blob when he reached his massive and imposing size just ended up looking silly on camera. This brought one of inherent and most dangerous problems of the recent trend in adapting comic books for the big screen, some of the characters just don’t translate well in a realistic fashion. Sometimes you have to find creative ways to get them up there in a different physical form while still holding onto the core meaning and nature of the character, not that I know a way to do that in the case of Blob, but the fact remains, he ended up reminding me of Chet from Weird Science when he got turned into a big pile of crap.
Recommendation: Having a three movie lead-in for this character built up a huge following, which is great for box office potential, yet it also built up huge expectations, which this film did not completely meet. It has some really good scenes, but it fails to keep the pace up throughout.
DandyID
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