X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Review By aeinhorn

So, anyone who has talked to me lately has heard me rail about just how bad I anticipated X-Men Origins: Wolverine to be. Despite expecting a train wreck of epic proportions, I still went to go see it last night.

The end result? Well, it was a mess, I can't sugar-coat that, but it was still considerably better than I expected it to be.

Was it great? No. It's never going to even come close to my top ten list of superhero films, to say nothing of my top ten list of films. But it was legitimately entertaining in many spots.

It did suffer from character bloat, with many of the more interesting characters (including, I can't believe I'm going to say this, Deadpool and Gambit) not getting enough screen time, simply because there were so many characters they had to throw onto the screen. And many of those characters could have easily been removed. We didn't need to include will.i.am's John Wraith, or Agent Zero, or Emma Frost (inexplicably, focusing on her diamond skin mutation, not the fact that she is nearly a Professor Xavier-class telepath), or honestly, half of the rest of Stryker's team.

It suffered from internal continuity issues, including the presence of a young Scott Summers. Actor replacement is often an issue, and boy howdy, if Liev Schreiber's Sabretooth is supposed to be the same Sabretooth as Tyler Mane's Sabretooth from X-Men, then clearly Victor Creed spent the intervening years getting a lot bigger and a lot dumber. And for some inexplicable reason, that made no difference in the slightest to the plot, they changed Scott's optic blast (a concussive force beam in both comics, cartoons, and the previous three movies) into a heat beam. There's also some terminology issues that could have been addressed - namely, where did the term "mutant" come from? and when did James "Jimmy" Howlett get the name "Logan"?

I am also skeptical of the fact that there was a dialect coach on-hand for the film (although there must have been, they were listed in the credits). Because Denny Huston had none of Brian Cox's southern accent, which was very distinct in X2, and Gambit's cajun accent was quite inconsistent.

Regardless of my problems with it, and the above are just a few of them, it wasn't terrible. I enjoyed it considerably more than I enjoyed Daredevil, or Spider-Man 3, or X3. But as the first superhero film of the summer, following a year where we had Iron Man, The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a distinct disappointment. Hugh Jackman has really claimed the character of Wolverine in a way that I have seen few other actors manage with their superhero roles, and it is obvious he loves the character. For all the issues of the differences from Tyler Mane's Sabretooth, Liev Schreiber does manage a first-rate performance as Victor Creed, and the Caine & Abel-esque interplay between him and Jackman is done very nicely. There isn't enough of Ryan Reynold's Wade Wilson, or Taylor Kitsch's Gambit to satisfy fans of either character, but they were both done well (yes, even though the accent thing bugged me).

Is it worth watching? Probably. If you like superhero films, and can ignore the consistency issues, then it's a decently entertaining film. That said, I can't imagine a person who would watch this movie who didn't at least watch X-Men and X2, and in those cases, the continuity issues might bug them.