REEL REVIEW: X Men Origins – Wolverine
Late May.
Must be summer time, or close to it, here in Vermont.
Unchain the season of the mindless action movie blockbuster!
And what better way to usher it in than with “X Men”?
Here’s what some of our local REEL REVIEW consultants had to say about the latest X-Men film:
“The film is not going to prime the pump for date night,” notes Jed Kalkstein, “but X Men can’t be beat for a night with the lads.”
“X Men’s predictable cycle of heart-pumping action scenes made it feel like an interval workout from a seated position,” explains Terry Kellogg.
Translation? Two thumbs up.
And yes, Aussie uber man Hugh Jackman is back as James Logan/Wolverine, in the latest installment of the lavish and hugely profitable cartoon franchise.
How did James Logan become the tortured spike-sporting keen smelling anti-hero we know and love? The film purports to answer this question,
Gone are all of Wolverine’s mutant sidekicks from the first films. Instead, the focus of the story is Logan almost exclusively – we see Wolverine grow up in a culture of endless war, recruited by a mysterious character named Stryker to join an elite government killing team staffed by bad-ass dudes with special powers. We also meet Wolverine’s brother Victor/Saber Tooth, played by a menacing but surprisingly engaging Liev Schreiber, who gets all o the film’s few toss-away one liners. “You never call, you never write,” he says to his long lost brother just before they mix it up.
Back up a minute: After six years of retirement as a Rocky Mountain lumberjack (by day) bedding a bodacious schoolteacher (by night), Logan is dragged back into the fray by Stryker, complete with dog tags stamped “Wolverine,” as “weapon X,” tricked out with a bonded ademantium-reinforced skeleton. The excruciatingly painful process goes awry, but Logan is saved by the kindness of an old farming couple. (Once again, farmers save the day.)
From here, things get much more exciting, if confusing, and I’ll save the twists and turns for you, dear viewer, to discover. Suffice to say, this is a big, sprawling messy film – rough around the edges. The action scenes are sloppily shot, the narrative arc shoddily constructed, the special effects poorly assembled, the acting compellingly mediocre. Very few funny one liners, either – a staple of summer action blockbusters. And I really missed Patrick Stewart (wait until the very end) and Ian McKellan – their absence left a void that no one really filled here.
Worse, maybe, is the complete absence of any of the interesting ethical questions – how does any society handle individuals who differ from the rest of us? – that made the other X Men films marginally relevant to real life. Passing trash talk about “preemption” and “our country needs you” rhetoric doesn’t even ring, let alone ring true. And watching Logan and his bad boy broher tear down the neighborhood is fun, but grows old after a while.
The X Men franchise has had a good run – but it will take learning from this film’s shortcomings to revitalize the genre if and when they make the next one.
Most likely when.
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