Review: X Men Origins: Wolverine

Beginning in Canada in the 1840’s with Logan (i.e. the soon-to-be Wolverine) as a sickly kid who is goaded into showing his feral side (hello and goodbye, former Aussie soap actor Peter O’Brien), forcing him to go on the run with his brother Victor (i.e. the soon-to-be Sabretooth). Gifted with near-indestructibility, the duo fight on the side of the US in wars through the ages and eventually are recruited into a secret defence unit by Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston). Victor (Live Schreiber), always a little feral, enjoys the killing, but Logan (Hugh Jackman) eventually finds it all a bit too amoral for his tastes and leaves the group to go and become a lumberjack in Canada, where he eventually romances Lynn Collins. Eventually their union meets tragedy, via a nefarious plot hatched between Stryker and Victor (the latter feeling abandoned by his brother), that sends Logan into revenge mode. The other members of Stryker’s team are played by Will.i.Am (as John Wraith, a teleporter with a cowboy hat), Ryan Reynolds (as a master sword-wielder), Kevin Durand (as Blob, who is...um...really fat), and Dom Monaghan (as Bolt, who has the power to look like a hobbit and that British dude from “Lost”). Taylor Kitsch turns up as mutant Gambit, who aids Logan in finding Stryker and can...um...throw playing cards at people. Veteran Aussie actors Max Cullen and Julia Blake turn up as a couple of old-timers who take Logan in at one point. Fellow Aussies Asher Keddie and Tahyna Tozzi appear as a doctor associate of Stryker’s and the diamond-encrusted mutant Emma Frost, respectively.

I haven’t been a huge fan of the series, but when I first saw the trailer for this 2009 “X-Men” spinoff/prequel from South African filmmaker Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”, “Rendition”) I figured that; a) Liev Schreiber looks like a whole lot of fun, b) I like Hugh Jackman, and liked his work in the previous films, and c) Gee, Gavin Hood sure is a weird choice for director, so this oughtta be at least interesting. Turns out I was right about Schreiber and I still like Jackman as an actor, but there’s very little about this dull, largely unconvincing, and extremely disappointing film. It’s not awful, it’s just sorta there. Nice to see a whole bunch of Aussie actors getting work (well, aside from Asher Keddie, who I just loathe), though, even if it gives the game away that this ain’t always Canada playing the part of Canada (though we do get an inexplicable, silent cameo by the normally likeably chatty Canadian poker pro Daniel Negreanu), and in fact some of it is New Zealand, I am lead to believe.

Clunky, heavy-handed, and disjointed storytelling has characters coming in and out of the story for frustratingly long lengths, and leaves several characters poorly developed. That last point wouldn’t be such an issue if not for the fact that most of the characters are new, so we don’t already know them and barely get to during the course of the film. It ends up rendering them cheesy caricatures and looking like the X-men B-team, they don’t even have any interesting superhero abilities (Partly due to this being a prequel, but I don’t think that explains everything, they’re still really lame). And any superhero gang that features a Black Eyed Pea (Some guy who doesn’t know how to properly spell the name William) is pretty sucky anyway, if you ask me. The worst thing about having all these characters, underdeveloped or not, is that they take the focus away from the title character. In the early passages there’s so little emphasis on the character of Wolverine that the film really ought to have been called “Lower Case X Men”. I joked about Dom Monaghan in the synopsis, but do you really want to hear that his special ability is sucking on light bulbs like Uncle Fester used to do in “The Addams Family”? I mean, that’s just lame. And billy.i.was is no better with his silly character, these are really lame also rans if you ask me. Ryan Reynolds might’ve been entertaining as a chatterbox swordsman but he is rubbed out early on only to return towards the end an altered beast named Deadpool and entirely unrecognisable, making him wasted on two fronts (Having said that, I didn’t like his eventual reprisal/re-do in “Deadpool”, either).

The film has a particularly unconvincing opening dealing with Wolverine and brother Sabretooth’s unusual childhood that admittedly was never going to be easy to convey, but it’s still pretty silly. Even worse is watching the duo fight for the US in several of the most important military conflicts in history, despite them being Canadians (oops!) and their powers don’t seem all that useful so they use regular military weapons! The fact that it’s essentially an idea stolen from “Watchmen” (wherein Dr. Manhattan was used as a kind of superhero napalm) doesn’t help, and please don’t write to me complaining that the Watchmen series came after the Wolverine character in comics. I’m a film critic, I review films, not comic books, so my point still stands, cinematically. Oh, and you can add the film version of “DOA: Dead or Alive” to the list of films ripped off here, as the whole ‘villain gathers all of the heroes’ powers and combines them’ idea is pretty damn similar to what Eric Roberts did in that slightly underrated, silly time-waster.

Mediocre as this all is, and believe me it is, the film does have positives. Well, two and a half. Jackman is Jackman, and that’s all fine and dandy. Even better is Schreiber, who easily walks off with the whole film with a sly, feral menace that suggests he’d make an excellent werewolf. The half a positive is Tozzi’s Diamante mutant, which is the best thing in the film, but barely glimpsed and even then, only towards the end. That makes her a little like Vinnie Jones’ hilarious Juggernaut in “X Men: The Last Stand”, I guess, I loved him but he’s in so little of it. Huston is fine as Stryker (I never much liked Brian Cox in the overrated “X2”) but the character ends up strangely being a rip-off of the character Bruce Davison played in the first two “X Men” movies.

Overall, this is a bit of a snore really, I’m not as high on the current crop of comic book films as most people seem to be (didn’t like Nolan’s “Batman” films much, hated “Iron Man” and “Thor: Ragnarok”, disliked “Deadpool”, and I liked “X Men: The Last Stand” more than “X2”), and this one’s just not very good. Meanwhile, of all the “X Men” characters to bring back for a cameo in a Wolverine spin-off, the one chosen here (and no, I’m not talking about the creepy, digitally-botoxed Patrick Stewart cameo) is certainly the strangest, if you think about it.

Really flat, uninspired stuff, I don’t even think die hard comic book readers will get much out of this. It’s pretty disappointing, if not outright terrible or anything.

Rating: C