Movie Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Written by: David Benioff and Skip Woods
Directed by: Gavin Hood
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Ryan Reynolds, Taylor Kitsch, Will.i.am., Kevin Durand, Dominic Monaghan, Danny Huston, Daniel Henney, Lynn Collins, and Liev Schreiber

Wolverine is finally here. It's one of the most anticipated films of the summer and is now in the wild for the rabid fans to devour. So how is it? That's why you're hear right? You want to know what I thought?

Well, It's tough to describe my feelings on the movie because I found it to be just kind of blah. I didn't feel like wasting the energy to hate it and I certainly didn't like it.

Click the rawr! to find out why.

Let's start with my feelings on X-Men 3. I loathed it. I was fuming mad while I watched it in the theater. I was watching one film destroy the legacy left by one of the single best comic book movies ever made be ripped apart bit by bit. There was nothing resembling X2 in X-Men 3. None of the heart, the spirit, nothing.

So imagine my concerns a few years later with X-Men Origins coming down the pipeline. I kept an open mind, I thought the trailers looked pretty cool and gradually my excitement began to build. The opportunities for a major action epic surrounding the life and times of Wolverine are endless. There is so much story to explore that it could easily be a 2-hour plus grand film. Instead, what we got was a ninety plus cliche.

The script is lazy. The directing is better fit for a lifetime movie event than a major tent pole comic book film. The acting for the most part is okay but nothing really worth mentioned outside of Hugh Jackman who continues to keep Wolverine fresh as a character.

The film is by and by extremely pointless. This is what happens when you put people in charge of a movie that have no real care or interest in the subject matter or the characters.

You put any first time writer or director who loves these characters and you will get a film 1000 times better than this.

It is a pointless film with no real reason to exist outside of taking peoples money (which I gladly handed over unfortunately).

The characters are a joke. There is no reason for any of the characters they put in this movie to be there outside of Wolverine. By the way, his origin lasts about ten minutes. Everything else is just events that take place before the first X-Men film. Events that are shoehorned in in a way that is baffling.

None of the characters are even worthy of discussion. With the exception of Wolverine and Sabertooth, they're barely more than cardboard cutouts. My biggest disappointment was Gambit. Sure Taylor Kitsch looks the part but that's about it. He doesn't have the gravitas it takes to play Gambit and worst of all there is NO Cajun accent to speak of. They stuck him in the movie just to get people's geek radar going and really didn't have him do anything else besides flip around and fling cards (which he barely did).

Despite all this, there is a little bit of fun to be had with this movie. The fight scenes for the most part are pretty cool, if not a little repetitive and over the top. There are some good one liners from Jackman as well.

Overall, Wolverine is just a run of the mill action movie that barely surpasses the nightmarish disaster that was X-Men 3. It is at times fun but for the most part is just not up to snuff. Especially, in light of recent comic book films like The Dark Knight and Iron Man.

I honestly think that X-Men 3 did such harm to the franchise that it will take a masterpiece to fix it and if I can say so there is only one man who can restore the X-Men franchise to it's former glory and that is Joss Whedon.

Stop these ridiculous X-Men Origins ideas, scrap the lame First Class ideas and put the franchise in his hands. It will be the second coming of the X-Men and it will be glorious.

As for Wolverine? Well, it's barely worth the price of a matinee so make your choice wisely. In this time of money woes, you're probably better off saving your cash for Star Trek.