X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Review By Josh

Origins bears little resemblance to the book with which it shares its name. Characters like Gambit, Cyclops, and Emma Frost have no business being in this movie, yet they are. Most of the plot is a mess of story strands from various comics that are weakly attempted at being woven into a coherent story. In this respect, and for this reason, Origins suffers from the same shortcomings that made X-Men: The Last Stand by far the weakest of the trilogy. The movie has so many characters that none really become important or interesting and the film fails to really gain momentum plotwise. Ryan Reynolds has a combined total of no more than ten minutes of screen time, and Dominic Monaghan and Taylor Kitsch have about the same. The sad thing is that Wolverine is really one of Marvel's most interesting properties, and has such a rich back story to choose from that this really could have been a compelling character film.

The cast works, especially Jackman's Logan and Liev Schreiber's Victor (Cain to Jackman's Abel). The relationship between the two works well despite the general mess of character development. "We're brothers...we can never be over." The romance between Kayla and Logan is nicely written in a couple of scenes as well, but like most of the film it is rushed and not allowed to develop.

Though Gambit is really a case of studio interference due to fan demand and doesn't really need to be here (see also Venom in Spider-Man 3) Taylor Kitsch pulls him off well, which is nice to see since he's been a character largely ignored thus far. There is a nice nod to the upcoming X-Men prequel with a cameo from a familiar face and the film manages to stay generally fun by injecting a decent dose of humor into a film that's fairly goofy.

Where the film succeeds is on the level of brainless action flick. There's a fight scene every five minutes, and some of them are quite violent for a PG13 film, especially those where Logan and Victor square off. I can recommend it based simply on that, but it fails to live up to both the standard set by the first two franchise films and the comic book legacy of the character.

I must admit, it was pretty clever of the writers to make the Three Mile Island reactor incident of the 1970s one of the film's major plot points.