X-Men Origins: Wolverine (12A.)
Directed by Gavin Hood. 2009
Starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Lynn Collins, Ryan Reynolds. 108 mins
Wolverine is already notorious for being pirated and available for download (in an incomplete version) more than a month before its release. The conspiracy theory has this as revenge for Fox threatening to block the release of Watchmen in a dispute over copyright.
Nonsense probably but it’s instructive that these two films are linked because they offer opposing but equally effective ways to mess up a comic book movie. Watchmen failed through an obsessive desire to please the fans which meant that everybody else was totally perplexed and unengaged with it. Wolverine is an exercise in playing safe and entertaining only the most easily pleased.
While the first two films in this mutant tale were rich and majestic creations, this is a pinched and meagre affair, a straightforward bonehead revenge plot with a few werewolf touches. All you get is a few nice shots mountainous landscape and some fight scenes to jog you along until a semi-lavish finale that has been bolstered by some modest expenditure on special effects.
It’s a grim, joyless affair, a gruesome trail of misery, destruction and death. Wolverine was the loose cannon in the X-Men series, the savage who is trying to control his wild urges. Here though this wild man with retractable steel claws is the good guy and everyone else is irredeemable evil, or instantly expendable.
There is logic to Fox’s thinking. The three X-Men films were ludicrously overstaffed. So many characters, so little time; they paid Halle Berry to do very little in three films. Better surely to just concentrate on the most popular character and do a prequel which tells how Wolverine got to be the amnesiac figure he is at the start of the first film. Which is fine except, who really cares? Hasn’t George Lucas already laboriously proved that if the climax of the story is the beginning, then it is no climax?
Still why sign lots of pay checks when you can just sign one big star one. Around the turn of the year the mass delusion descended that Jackman was one of the world’s biggest stars. Now he is indeed an impressive performer and his ability to mix screen action hero with being an acclaimed star of Broadway/ West End musicals is an amazing feat - he likes a Hollywood version of John Barrowman – but his movie career so far is not that of a big star. His Wolverine was great in the ensemble but left on its own you don’t get much more than lots of muscle flexing and a Dirty Harry hairdo.
Directed by Gavin Hood. 2009
Starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Lynn Collins, Ryan Reynolds. 108 mins
Wolverine is already notorious for being pirated and available for download (in an incomplete version) more than a month before its release. The conspiracy theory has this as revenge for Fox threatening to block the release of Watchmen in a dispute over copyright.
Nonsense probably but it’s instructive that these two films are linked because they offer opposing but equally effective ways to mess up a comic book movie. Watchmen failed through an obsessive desire to please the fans which meant that everybody else was totally perplexed and unengaged with it. Wolverine is an exercise in playing safe and entertaining only the most easily pleased.
While the first two films in this mutant tale were rich and majestic creations, this is a pinched and meagre affair, a straightforward bonehead revenge plot with a few werewolf touches. All you get is a few nice shots mountainous landscape and some fight scenes to jog you along until a semi-lavish finale that has been bolstered by some modest expenditure on special effects.
It’s a grim, joyless affair, a gruesome trail of misery, destruction and death. Wolverine was the loose cannon in the X-Men series, the savage who is trying to control his wild urges. Here though this wild man with retractable steel claws is the good guy and everyone else is irredeemable evil, or instantly expendable.
There is logic to Fox’s thinking. The three X-Men films were ludicrously overstaffed. So many characters, so little time; they paid Halle Berry to do very little in three films. Better surely to just concentrate on the most popular character and do a prequel which tells how Wolverine got to be the amnesiac figure he is at the start of the first film. Which is fine except, who really cares? Hasn’t George Lucas already laboriously proved that if the climax of the story is the beginning, then it is no climax?
Still why sign lots of pay checks when you can just sign one big star one. Around the turn of the year the mass delusion descended that Jackman was one of the world’s biggest stars. Now he is indeed an impressive performer and his ability to mix screen action hero with being an acclaimed star of Broadway/ West End musicals is an amazing feat - he likes a Hollywood version of John Barrowman – but his movie career so far is not that of a big star. His Wolverine was great in the ensemble but left on its own you don’t get much more than lots of muscle flexing and a Dirty Harry hairdo.
