Box Office Review - X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, Rendition) helms Wolverine’s origin story, an okay film that has so much to say that it forgets to focus on any one thing. It is pretty difficult to tell a man’s story in two hours when he has been alive since the 1800s. It starts off with Logan as a child, and then during the opening credit sequence it shows time passing by featuring all the wars that he fought in. American Civil War, WW1, WW2, Vietnam all these are featured in a five minute clip. I wish that the war scenes were drawn out longer as they were quiet interesting, but hey this isn’t even part of the main story. The story picks up after the Vietnam War, and it shows how and why he gets the adamantium grafted to his skeletal system as well as how he loses his memory. The X-Men have such a vast mythology that it must be hard to decide which characters to feature and what to reference. That can be felt throughout the film. The story works its way around for a while and then throws everything at the audience in the last act. There were many characters that appear that really were not necessary. I have felt that this has been a fault of the rest of the X-Men series, and I guess it comes with adapting such a vast comic series. Hugh Jackman is good in his fourth time playing the role, and it is believable that his character doesn’t age. Liev Schrieber plays his enemy Sabertooth and does a good job providing some believability and menace to a character I have never liked. Danny Huston shows up as Striker (the character played by Brian Cox in X2) and he is also very good. I want to see more of him in movies. Ryan Reynolds, and Dominic Monagahan have small cameos. That covers the acting, but what is most important in any super hero blockbuster is the special effects. The CG in this is sometimes good and sometimes very bad. Explosions were decent, but the green screen work was fairly obvious whenever a character was shown doing anything ridiculous. The most annoying part was Wolverine’s claws. The close-ups looked very fake, and there was an entire scene of him testing them out that should have been cut. Effects aside the movie was enjoyable and in the end, can easily go beside the other movies in the franchise.

A Good Banana