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X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Hugh Jackman returns to his superhero role of Logan/Wolverine from the X-Men trilogy in the first of these spinoffs, a good bet for Fox to make a lot of money from a decent Marvel franchise.
However, it seems that whoever green-lit this just wanted an Origins movie and there wasn't really much of storyline already in mind, nor extracted from the comics. As it is, there are few surprises in the Wolverine origin story told here beyond what we found out in X2, apart from the fact that Logan was originally Jimmy and had bone claws before he got adamantium grafted to his skeleton, and he has a brother called Victor Creed who's a bad mutant (I think it's implied he is Sabretooth, but if that's the case, why didn't Sabretooth ever give any indication of knowing Wolverine was his brother in X-Men 1? I have no idea what the proper comics continuity is when it comes to Logan's brother or whatever, but who knows? And because of that, why did he go from Jimmy to Logan, and when? This movie doesn't even address that).
Anyway... for a superhero movie, we get a fair few mutants showing their skills, a lot of inner conflict for Wolverine (protecting his bloodthirsty brother who performs acts which he himself finds morally abhorrent) and some nice fights and some good action. The problem is that it's not all that engaging, and you know he's going to lose his memory in the end which means a lot of his actions are pretty meaningless. The timing of the action is also a little confusing - we know it's some time after the Vietnam War but before the events of X-Men, and it's kind of implied that it might be the early 80's, but there's very very little in the way of technology/scenery/fashion that gives us any indication of the exact era. I think it would be great if they had deliberately placed the story in the late 70s/ early 80s because then there would have been some historical things that it could be tied to (apart from one at the end that you'll probably work out yourself).
Jackman seems to be phoning it in, we know he has more acting chops than this, and the rest of the cast is pretty ordinary too. However, I don't the script really gave them much to work with either.
Kinda ordinary, overall. But then again, it's quite hard to top X-Men and X2 anyway, which were very well put together films. Perhaps X-Men: Origins - Magneto will be better, but considering we pretty much have his origin story from the X-Men opening sequence, I'm not sure the rest of it will be that great. Plus he turns out to be a villain, so how are you supposed to be sympathetic to him?
6/10
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Hugh Jackman returns to his superhero role of Logan/Wolverine from the X-Men trilogy in the first of these spinoffs, a good bet for Fox to make a lot of money from a decent Marvel franchise.
However, it seems that whoever green-lit this just wanted an Origins movie and there wasn't really much of storyline already in mind, nor extracted from the comics. As it is, there are few surprises in the Wolverine origin story told here beyond what we found out in X2, apart from the fact that Logan was originally Jimmy and had bone claws before he got adamantium grafted to his skeleton, and he has a brother called Victor Creed who's a bad mutant (I think it's implied he is Sabretooth, but if that's the case, why didn't Sabretooth ever give any indication of knowing Wolverine was his brother in X-Men 1? I have no idea what the proper comics continuity is when it comes to Logan's brother or whatever, but who knows? And because of that, why did he go from Jimmy to Logan, and when? This movie doesn't even address that).
Anyway... for a superhero movie, we get a fair few mutants showing their skills, a lot of inner conflict for Wolverine (protecting his bloodthirsty brother who performs acts which he himself finds morally abhorrent) and some nice fights and some good action. The problem is that it's not all that engaging, and you know he's going to lose his memory in the end which means a lot of his actions are pretty meaningless. The timing of the action is also a little confusing - we know it's some time after the Vietnam War but before the events of X-Men, and it's kind of implied that it might be the early 80's, but there's very very little in the way of technology/scenery/fashion that gives us any indication of the exact era. I think it would be great if they had deliberately placed the story in the late 70s/ early 80s because then there would have been some historical things that it could be tied to (apart from one at the end that you'll probably work out yourself).
Jackman seems to be phoning it in, we know he has more acting chops than this, and the rest of the cast is pretty ordinary too. However, I don't the script really gave them much to work with either.
Kinda ordinary, overall. But then again, it's quite hard to top X-Men and X2 anyway, which were very well put together films. Perhaps X-Men: Origins - Magneto will be better, but considering we pretty much have his origin story from the X-Men opening sequence, I'm not sure the rest of it will be that great. Plus he turns out to be a villain, so how are you supposed to be sympathetic to him?
6/10