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Friday, May 1, 2009
Prequel dulls Wolverine’s claws
Much ado has been made of the workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine that leaked onto the Net several weeks ago. I’ve seen what is supposed to be the final version, but I could swear the film still isn’t finished.
Meant to be a prequel to the three X-Men movies, Wolverine feels more like the junior league entry in the series. It’s watchable enough, with some good moments, but the movie comes across as undercooked, both narratively and technically.
It starts well enough, with a strong credits sequence explaining how Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and his brother, Victor/Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) have lived through the centuries, fighting in every major war from the Civil War through Vietnam. They run across William Stryker (Danny Huston), a military commando who forms his own strike team of mutants. When their missions begin to turn sinister, Logan balks, much to the dismay of Victor, who becomes increasingly dangerous.
It makes more than enough sense that Wolverine was chosen as the origin story, since the consensus is that he’s the most popular X-Man, and Jackman has more than enough talent to carry the movie. Even so, I felt oddly detached most of the way.
That I knew that Wolverine was going to survive this ordeal shouldn’t have been a problem, but the screenplay by David Benioff and Skip Woods didn’t carry enough emotional heft to make me forget that I knew how it was all going to come out. The story unfolds with such obviousness, I even guessed the “surprise” cameo correctly.
That’s not to say there isn’t good material in Wolverine. It’s no surprise that Jackman’s charisma goes a long way, but Schreiber and Huston are equally strong as the villains. It’s just too bad the everything around them isn’t as compelling as they are. Some of the supporting mutants are downright corny. A guy who throws around deadly playing cards? That’s stupid, even for a comic book movie.
Still, for all the rumblings of director Gavin Hood being inexperienced at action scenes, the movie actually delivers those fairly well. Hood’s no Bryan Singer, who made the first two movies, and I would even argue he’s no Brett Ratner, the director of the third movie - who for all his shortcomings, knows his way around a popcorn flick Still, Hood gets the job done proficiently if unremarkably, with the fight scenes between Wolverine and Sabretooth being especially effective.
However, the action scenes have other shortcomings. The effects work is passable at best, and distractingly fake at worst. If these are the finished shots, I shudder to think how the workprint must have looked.
Wolverine never bored me, exactly. Occasionally I was intrigued and entertained, but ultimately I was indifferent to the movie, whose mutation is the ability to make a carbon copy - something that’s reasonably close to, but not quite as good as the original.
GRADE: C+
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