X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Review: X-men origins: Wolverine

Dir: Gavin Hood

Cert. 12a

107mins

2009

Like its titular cigar-chomping hero, Wolverine is short, violent and ugly.

And did I mention stupid?

My goodness, Wolverine is stupid. Played with unnerving enthusiasm by Hugh Jackman, Wolverine is a bloodthirsty amnesiac with a history that is considered convoluted even by comic book standards (this is, remember, a universe in which the past is regularly rewritten in order to explain away glaring inconsistencies). He's a lame and generic anti-hero. The film is just as confused and equally berserk.

The film is a misguided effort to colour in Wolverine’s mysterious past and explain how he came to be the metal-boned badass who rose to dominate the X-men comics. X-men, long before Jackman played Wolverine in all three of the largely decent movies, started life as an allegory for racial tolerance in the middle of the Civil Rights movement. Wolverine on the other hand is cool because he drinks, smokes and kills people.

Wolverine is based on ludicrous plot contrivances, inexplicable character motivations and the notion that overblown action sequences will make up for the fact that the film just doesn’t make sense. Jackman careers wildly through his scenes, but the film’s heavy-handedness robs Wolverine of the already flimsy moral ambiguity that made him popular in the first place. The nastiest thing this Wolverine does is smoking in public. The supporting cast is made up of disposable cameos by B-list comic book characters who add almost nothing to the narrative, which blasts cheerfully along never bothering to explain why anybody does anything. Wolverine’s half-brother ‘Sabretooth’ (Liev Schreiber, trying hard to carry off a little dignity), is a woefully ill-conceived nemesis who scampers around on all fours like a bearded cat in an overcoat. Sabretooth spends the movie tempting Wolverine to abandon his heroic ways and join him for some mildly homo-erotic bloodlust, but once again the film’s overwhelming stupidity wastes this opportunity. Sabretooth is no more than a two dimensional villain, and Wolverine is never realistically tempted to do anything worse than strike a dramatic pose.

I’ve long held the belief that the majority of comic books are just soap-operas in spandex, and Wolverine plays out like a superpowered episode of Days of Our Lives. Ridiculous bouts of plot-enhancing amnesia? Check. Characters arbitrarily returning from the grave? Check. Big hair? Check. It feels cheap and desperate, and this is compounded by surprisingly lacklustre and inconsistent special effects. In addition, the 12a rating means that every fit of ‘berserker’ violence is completely bloodless.

My goodness, Wolverine is stupid.

4/10

-James