[Warning: In this review I tear Wolverine in half. Also SPOILERS for the movie.]
Wolverine has always been an incredibly popular character. Despite not being one of the original X-Men he has now become the poster boy for the entire franchise. My little brother even originally thought that the name of our hairy blue and yellow spandexed animal was in fact "X-Man". Its only natural that as a Canadian I am proud of having a Canadian character that has managed to achieve the same amount of popularity as the Batman's and Superman's of the comic book world. I'm personally even more proud also as an Australia that Hugh Jackman has managed to portray our favorite canuck incredibly well in all X-Men movies, despite the failure that was the third movie. Mr. Jackman not unlike Christopher Reeves, loves the character he's portraying and is capable even during the most cringe worthy moments of the movie of making me enjoy his performance. I just wanted to say this before I started ripping the new movie apart.
I knew this movie was gonna be bad from the get go, the first ten minutes of the movie play out like a bad soap opera. The movie starts off with a young James Howlett (aka Logan aka Wolverine) sick in his bed whining about being sick in his bed, his friend Victor Creed (aka Sabertooth) stands by his bed and tells him to stop being a pussy. Wolverine's dad enters the room, comforts his son then his mother is heard screaming downstairs, apparently Victors father, a violent drunk (cliché), is beating James' mother. So the father runs downstairs, we hear gunshots, James runs downstairs, his father's been shot and killed Oh no! So he goes to hug his dying father and in this incredibly emotional moment bone claws come out of his hands for the first time. (note:there is no blood when the claws come out, in fact I'm pretty sure there is no blood in the entire fucking movie. Sabertooth puts his hand through a guy's fucking chest and there's no blood... at all.)
Lets compare to the vastly superior X-Men 2:
Ya, usually people bleed when big fucking adamantium claws come out their hands.
Anyway back to the story... after his dad dies little wolverine spawns his claws he then looks to the ceiling and screams as the camera pans up and away from him, yes its the most cliché overused scene ever. But wait its not over... Wolvie gets up runs towards Victor's father and stabs him with his claws. As the man dies we get the overly dramatic reveal that he is in fact Wolverine's father and that he and Victor are brothers, dun dun dun!!! Any hope I might still have had that this could be a good movie when I entered the theater was pretty much gone by the time the opening credits started playing. The entire rest of the movie consists of Sabertooth becoming evil, Wolverine becoming the good guy and both of them wanting to kill each other for various reasons. (Revenge, Abandonment...) They of course team up at the end of the movie to fight the real bad guy and save the world. Wow...
As numerous other people have mentioned the movie strays very far from the source material. My problem with it isn't that the ruined any specific characters' (although they did, poor deadpool). My problem was how much they toned the movie down for kids. It made me think of the X-Men animated series of the 90's. That shw was so censored that Wolverine wasn't allowed to stab anyone with his claws. So he'd take his claws out to look cool and then put them back when fighting the bad guys. Wolverine throughout the movie talks about how dangerous and bad he is how he's an animal and he's so good at killing yet the only slicing and dicing we get in the entire fucking movie is at the end when he cuts the supermutant's head off there is of course no blood. This movie should have been darker, more violent, bloodier not because "darker is cooler" but because its a fucking Wolverine movie. The reason why Wolverine became so popular was because he was an anti-hero, in the comics he wasn't like the other heroes he did things his own way he had no qualms with killing and did whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. In this movie however he's simply a dull generic formulaic hollywood good guy. That is what's wrong with this movie.
Apart from Hugh Jackman, Liev Shrieber (Sabertooth) and Ryan Reynolds (Wade Wilson) did very good jobs portraying their characters. Taylor Kitsch as Gambit was also pretty good. The problem was that, apart from Sabertooth, all the other character apeared on screen for maybe 5 minutes each. Like X-Men 3 it seems the film makers tried to stuff as much mutants as they could into the story. Some characters with depth and very important roles in the comics have been downgraded to cameo characters. How sad...
One last thing, the claws: Wolverine's CGI claws are horrible! They look like they were painted on top of the image. At some there isn't even anything connecting Wolverines adamantium claws to his hands. A lot of the CGI in this movie is very poorly done and with a 150 million dollar budget makes me wonder where all their fucking money went. (Hugh Jackman's hairgel?) X-Men 1 was able to make really good looking claws with a third of the new movie's budget.
If your a fan of the character or of comic books don't go see this movie, I you want a really stupid, generic, badly written action movie by all means pay the 10$ on it. Or you could keep the money to go see Star Trek (Which is apparently very good.)
-BeaverMoose
some parts of this movie were okay (like anything with Liev Schreiber or Ryan Reynolds)... but almost everything else was oozing with generic, canned cheese
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