So today I decided to go check out X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I was pretty pumped I must say since I have always wanted to see Wolverine in a true gritty hack ’em slash’em onscreen adventure. Plus I have been a pretty big fan of Hugh Jackman as everybody’s fav berserker canuck! Let’s face it folks, Hugh is looking better than he ever has as this character. I’ve always had high hopes for this film since we have the perfect leading man cast as Wolverine and let’s face it it’s gotta be pretty hard to make a crappy Wolverine movie right? Well they went against all the odds and succeeded in making an ultra crap-tastic adventure!! Yes true beleivers Wolverine does indeed, well, kinda suck.
But it is tolerable. It’s a crappy action movie with a whole bus load of un-interesting characters. Yeah this stupid movie is jam packed with lame-o’ coulda been cool mutants. The story is completely a mess with almost all of Wolverine’s entire past explained and shown within the opening credits. Sabretooth is for some reason immediately introduced as Wolverine’s brother in a short sequence near the beginning (loosely based on the Origin comic) and from that point on the two brothers run off together, get a wild hair up their ass and decide to fight together for the United States in pretty much in every war we’ve ever been involved in. Yeah things go bad between them when they are recruited by Stryker for a special covert team. Sabretooth tries to kill an innocent and Wolverine quits the team.
Then he decides to be a logger back in Canada with his girlfriend Silverfox. This story continues on in about 50 different directions trying to cover as much ground and introduce as many new mutants as possible in under two hours. That’s also when they start introducing characters for the sake of having them appear in the movie and wowing fanboys. About half-way through they decide to have a boxing match with Wolverine and Blob in the movie for no real reason whatsoever. Then a meeting with Gambit so they can duke it out for a while too. Then throw a young Cyclops into the mix too for good measure.
Hey Let’s box for no reason!
At no point in the movie did I ever really care for any character, not even ol’ Wolvie himself. The movie itself has even less of a heart than than X-men: 3. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine this time around is merely a shadow what he was in the previous films and an even paler reflection of his comic book counterpart. Leiv Shrieber’s Sabretooth was better than I expected but still my standards for his character were pretty low when entering the theater so still I was hardly impressed. It was pretty funny though watching him jumping ridiculously on all fours like he was playing a psychotic game of leap frog.
Wolverine’s claws managed to look completely fake (cg claws dude! cool!) as well-wow Hollywood can’t even pull off three metal claws sticking out of guy’s knuckle correctly! And you know those epic flashbacks of the Weapon X program transforming Wolvie’s bones and body into a living weapon? Well that whole schtick takes under three minutes of screen time to complete. Apparently these writers never read Barry Windsor Smith’s Weapon X comic series?! Sorry Barry you got screwed! Then there’s the whole Deadpool shenanigans which I think they pretty much fumbled the ball on as well.
By the time the movie ended I just wanted to go home and read some real Wolverine adventures. The ones where you actually give a shit about this amazing character. The ones where he’s a real beer swiggin’ bad ass and Sabretooth is psychotic monster to be feared. The ones where when Wolverine cuts someone with his razor sharp claws they actually bleed.
One thing I know for sure is that this movie will be a hit, there will be a sequel and probably a Deadpool spin-off movie. But really if you truely love this character then I highly doubt this movie will give you the on screen fix you’ve always dreamnt of. It just makes me think even stronger than before that comic book characters should be left in the pages of the books of the writers who truely love them. Not under the control of writers looking to make your favorite comic book into a “Fast and The Furious” multi-million dollar blockbuster for the silver screen….
I think I’ll just take my Frank Miller Wolverine adventures from now on thank you.
Universal Dork 
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