Rating:
3 out of 5
Short version: While not exactly great, Wolverine is better than X-Men 3 and is a decent start to the 2009 Summer movie season.
Screen Rant reviews X-Men Origins: Wolverine
So it’s finally here… The next X-Men movie, Wolverine. There’s been MUCH controversy surrounding this film (at least to fans of the comic book titles) – certain characters injected into the film that shouldn’t be there (a young Cyclops, for example), the height difference between Wolverine and Sabretooth (silly, in my opinion), whether Gambit would have an appropriate Cajun accent, and the biggie: The depiction of “Deadpool” (played by Ryan Reynolds).
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For details and reader comments on all this check out this summary post of the Wolverine controversies.
In addition to that we had the April Fool’s day bombshell of a workprint of the movie making its way onto the internet. Would this hurt the box office? Early opening weekend ticket sales indicate that it probably didn’t.
Wolverine follows the life of James Logan from a young boy (in the late 1800s?), through (briefly) a number of wars and takes us through his adamantium skeleton implantation and right up until the point where he loses his memory. As a young boy, we discover that the older boy (Victor Creed) who will become Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) is actually Logan’s brother.
After a death, the boys go on the run and during the opening title sequence we watch as they fight side by side in a number of wars. During this sequence (which is quite possibly the coolest thing in the entire film) we watch as Victor becomes more and more bloodthirsty as Logan tries to hold him back. Eventually it culminates in the murder of an officer, and the army attempts to execute them both. Too bad both of them have regenerative healing powers and can’t be easily killed.
This is where William Stryker (Danny Huston) comes in and offers them the chance to “really serve their country.” Here is where we meet the other members of Stryker’s team: Agent Zero (not clear on his power), Wade Wilson (assassin with healing ability already?), John Wraith (teleporter), Frederick J. Dukes (future Blob and incredibly strong and resilient) and Bolt (telekinetic powers).
They go on a mission, things get out of hand, and Logan bails on the team. Six years later we find him living in Washington state as a logger with a beautiful woman in a lone cabin. Things look good, but of course they don’t last. One thing leads to another and Logan goes back to Stryker, who wants to turn him into a super-weapon. Logan agrees if he can get revenge on Sabretooth – and warns Stryker that he is now the animal that Stryker always said he was.
As indicated in the previous X-Men movies, things do NOT go well directly after the adamantium implantation, but it is pretty cool to see exactly what went down during and after the procedure.
In order to track down Sabretooth he comes across John Wraith again and the (now) Blob, where we get a bit of a funny scene between the two. From there he seeks out Gambit who, yes, has a slight Cajun accent (almost unnoticeable). [MINOR SPOILER AHEAD] A battle soon ensues between Sabretooth and Wolverine, which is for some bizarre reason interrupted by Gambit, allowing Sabretooth to escape. Within the context of the story and considering Gambit’s reaction to the mention of Victor Creed, it didn’t really make any sense to me. [END SPOILER]
Eventually Wolverine makes it to the secret base where a bunch of mutants who could very well be the cast of the in development film X-Men: First Class. He runs into Weapon XI (previously Wade Wilson aka Deadpool) and the big final beat-down ensues.
So after all this, what’s the verdict?
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not that bad. In fact, I’d say it’s pretty decent – IF you’re not a hardcore fan of the comic book universe. If you’re a fan (which I’m not, really) I’d say all of your fears about characters and their relationships will be realized in the film.
From what I’ve read, fans are going to be pretty mad about the depiction of Wade Wilson (I don’t want to call him Deadpool, since he doesn’t seem to be that character yet) in the film. There’s also the issue of Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Wolverine having met prior to the events of the first X-Men film.
Some of the “adamantium claws” CGI was pretty poor. Why, I have no idea since I thought the claws looked pretty darned good in the previous films. Did the maybe go from mainly mechanical effects to poorly done CGI? Also, with two primary characters using claws to basically rip, shred, stab and disembowel their opponents, the lack of a single drop of blood being shed is highly noticeable and ridiculous. Ane the way in which Wolverine loses his memory… it’s not the actual way in which he loses it, but the certainty on the part of Stryker that it will work that seemed pretty silly.
There was also a scene early on where Agent Zero reloads a couple of handguns in the most ridiculous way possible – I actually laughed out loud when it happened, and that was not the intention of the scene. Then again, that could just be because I’m pretty familiar with handguns.
As to Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson, I’m conflicted. I think Reynolds was a good casting choice, but especially considering that they supposedly went back and added more shots with him, he didn’t have much face time as himself (as opposed to Weapon XI). He got off a couple of minor zingers, but nothing really substantial as far as wisecracks. He did have a very cool scene early on in the film however, where he gets to show off his skills.
So what was good? Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber were great – both individual and when sharing scenes. Some of the action was pretty great, especially the few scenes where Gambit was utilized (would’ve liked to have seen more of that). I also really liked Lynn Collins as Logan’s love interest. Oh, and Wolverine is no longer the “wuss” he was being turned into more and more with each subsequent X-Men film – here he is a bad-ass once again.
Overall X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a not-very-deep, surface-level kind of movie where you don’t really get drawn into the characters very much (although I imagine that’s what director Gavin Hood was trying to accomplish). You just don’t get to know the characters very well outside of Wolverine. Even with all the screen time given to Creed, he still seems one-dimensional (at least until the very end of the film). It’s not as good as the first two X-Men films, but it’s better than X-Men 3.
However if you’re not hung up on the comic book details and don’t look for too much from it, I think you’ll enjoy the film as an action-packed popcorn movie, and a decent opener to the 2009 Summer blockbuster movie season.
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148 Comments
I dont understand why blood in a movie automatically makes it R. Did anyone see the Heroes finale? There was a pretty graphic scene that any kid could watch. I am not advocating TV tone it down, I am just wondering why the standards for movie blood are so much stricter.
The continuity stuff doesnt bother me .
I will go expecting a decent summer action flick
Thanks Vic!
next week,
STAR TREK!
WOO HOO!
(or as I like to think of it,
this years Iron Man ,
at least in terms of entertainment pleasure.)
@Hero Supreme
EXCELLENT point! I’ve seen some stuff and Heroes and Fringe that look like the TOTALLY deserve an R rating. There’s a hell of a dichotomy there between movies and TV shows it seems.
Heck, there was a scene on Smallville last night that looked like it came right out of a “Saw” movie…
Vic
I’m not a fan of the comics, so the stuff that they changed doesn’t bother me. Frankly, I liked this movie as much as I like X-Men 3, enough that I found it enjoyable, but nothing like as much as I enjoyed X-Men 2.
Really, I didn’t mind wasting 2 hours on this movie, but that’s the best I can say about it.
@ Walwus
I couldn’t agree more….
Here’s hoping South Park has something to say similar to what they said about Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas’ treatment of Indiana Jones….
Vic,
Box office predictions?
I have heard $75 $80 $85 $90
And of course $100 milion
Your thoughts?
Hey, Vic, what did you mean with “…I saw what is apparently ONE of the Weapon XI/Deadpool andings…”
You mean there is more than one ending scene about Deadpool? BTW, great review, I haven’t seen it, but I know I’ll somehow like it (partially)
@Iron Knight
You know those short scenes usually put in after, or during the credits that a lot of comic books films like to have? Well Wolverine has about 6 of them but you only see one per showing (so if you want to see all of them, you’d need to see the movie multiple times). There’s apparently one involving weapon XI. The one I saw involved Stryker.
@Gary
Not my prediction, but the buzz is about $92MM this weekend.
@Iron Knight
I hear there are two different Weapon XI endings.
Vic
Just youtube the endings, lol.
The Deadpool ending is on you tube.
I havent clicked on it .
I will see the film tomorrow.
Nikki Finke reports That the midnight screenings of Wolverine made about $5 million.
Vic,
according to Wikipedia ,Agent Zero has the power to absorb the kinetic energy of any impact.
He can survive high falls, energy blasts and even the blow of an opponent with superhuman strength .
his powers have mutated over they years .
At one point he had to release the energy from the impacts he sustained through concussive /heat blasts.
Later he emitted an acidic enzyme that could increase the severity of an opponents wounds.
as a side effect of this abilty ,
Agent Zero has no discernible scent .
during a period in the 70s when he inexpicably lost his powers he became a mercenary named Maverick.
Maverick became very proficent with firearms .
I hope this helps.
and for all you X-Philes out there ,
I left out a lot of Agent Zeros history .
I was just focusing on his abilties .
And again the source for this is not ME !
Its wikipedia.
You know, they have an Asian in an action movie without martial arts, I’m happy about that single fact alone… Oh wait, does he do martial arts?? From the trailers it just looks like he is good with firearms…
I agree with you Vic, with a rating of 3 out of 5. Being a fanboy myself they chopped and screwed details of many of the characters. For example, Deadpool, they totally didn’t stay in continuity, but that just goes to show you about Hollywood.
Bottom line though, was this film entertaining? I’m guessing for the masses it will be, but as a fan its ok and I say that with the faintest of heart.
If your curious about the behind the scenes of the creation of Wolverine, read this interview that I did with one of its creators
http://www.hundredpercentsd.com/main/?p=4943
I’m betting the word of mouth is going to lower that 90mil opening down to about 55mil.
Yea for the most part I agree completely with you Vic. Though I’m a huge comic fan. I can push past changes because of the way I watch movies. The only one that bothered me was what they did to deadpool. I can handle the height thing and Cyclops being in it. Oh and by the way if you pay close attention Scott never sees Logan and no one says the name Wolverine or Logan in front of him. I’ll be watching it again, but I’m pretty sure he says maybe one word tops in front of Cyclops and I believe he is called James even so they didn’t really meet before. That part isn’t even really an issue. They did screw deadpoll though.
I’m going saturday night but not expecting much. thx for the heads-up.
you shouldnt have taken the .5 away, you should have added another .5
Come on, Vic! I’m beginning to doubt your analyses here. You give Punisher War Zone a thumbs up and you give this a lacklustre rating? (By the way @Gambit and huntthejest- the first Punisher was Dolph Lundgren and not Tom Jane- now this may have been before your time but much much better) Why is that? No gore?
Guys, i’ve been a Marvel fan since the early 80s but lets ease up on sticking to details or we’ll all have a cardiac! It’s obvious we can’t all have a depiction that satisfies us all. First time i saw Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, i thought he was too tall, not hairy enough,his side-burns and top hair not as defined as in the comics. But now i think he was meant for the part. Spidey didnt have web-shooters but hey! who’s complaining?Summary: let’s learn to loosen up abit.Please.
Now about the movie. I liked it. When you want to assess a character for a movie be fair. Does Wolvie have popular supporting characters like Mary Jane,J.J. Jameson,Lois Lane etc to keep a movie going? No. Note i said popular. The wolverine solo comic was epileptic. Usually a mini-series or graphic novel. Wolverine was more of a team character than a Spidey or Batman. So they did the best they could resting on the strength of the Wolverine character itself. It was a long shot for a 2hr movie but i guess they pulled it off. Oh, by the way,Vic, cyclops didn’t actually meet Wolverine. He was ‘blindfolded’ all the time.
There is only one minus i had with the movie: poor research. To spend all that kind of money on a movie and not get one’s facts right on a country is saddening. You dont have druglords with their own tanks and sophisticated weaponry in Lagos, Nigeria. That’s anarchy. It’s like having same in New York or London. Lagos is the economic capital -a mega-city: one of top ten in the world. Now if they had said the delta regions where the militants are then.. Don’t they even watch CNN? And Wade’s interpretation of local chief’s statement was way off target. What he said in Igbo language was ‘i dont know where it came from, i swear to God’ and not ‘it’s sacred’. Who does the research on these things, please?
All in all, i enjoyed the movie. Dont expect it to be another Spidey – the supporting characters themselves are iconic.
I don’t think he gave it a luke warm review because of it not following the comics. He’s stated that he’s not really huge on the comics. I think he stated his reasons for not thinking this is a great movie and for the most part it’s for more technical issues like bad special effects, some unbelievable parts or dialogue, and other things like that which allows for variations from the comics.
I personally believe that comics cannot be translated directly into movies without being extremely campy and corny. They have to make SOME changes for them to work.
Vic, can you make an article where we can talk about what ending we saw, i wanna know all of them.
I thought the movie was ok.
I too was confused by Gambit interrupting the fight between Logan & Victor. It didn’t make any sense. I thought he’d more likely just run away.
I was a bit disappointed in the fight scenes. They could’ve been better and longer. Victor fights the exact same way every time starting with that lunging move.
How exactly was John Wraith planning on killing Sabretooth? Did he seriously think he could punch him to death while teleporting in and out?
Turning Wade Wilson into Weapon XI was kinda lame. I don’t see how the “secret” ending for him made any sense (dude was completely decapitated, how the hell do you come back from that?). Although I can see the possibility that since Weapon XI was activated prematurely that he loses all his powers (except healing factor and super strength) and it causes his skin to deform transforming him into the Deadpool we all know and love.
I thought Reynolds did a good job with the few scenes he had…although it’s ridiculous that his character could deflect all those bullets with his swords. Deadpool isn’t super fast or anything.
The movie had too many characters. Most barely get any screen time and are killed off as quickly as they were introduced.
Daniel Henney (half korean actor) was not bad as Agent Zero. It’s cool seeing an Asian male who’s not a martial artist or a nerd in a movie/tv show (although he’s doing the double gun action a la Chow Yun Fat).
The rivalry between Logan and Victor was really lacking don’t know how to explain it. Having Logan and Victor be brothers really didn’t make their rivalry anymore intense. I’m getting tired of movies where the main hero and villain always have some past connection to each other. Can’t total strangers hate each other just as much? They don’t have to be childhood friends or brothers or whatever to make their rivalry “epic”.
The thing i got from the Gambit scene was that he just simply didnt believe Logan, he thought he was sent by Stryker to bring him back to the island, not until Logan kicked his ass did he listen lol. And people shouldnt complain about the characters not having enough screen time, its a Wolverine film. Not every single one of your favorite characters is gonna get their own film so be happy they are even on screen. Do you guys want a Deadpool film with other characters getting more screen time? Didnt think so.
I thought the movie was good, either a 3.5 out of 5 or a 4 out of 5 but I know absolutely nothing about the history of these characters before reading what I’ve read on here, so I don’t really care how FOX screwed them up even though it seems that they would have been better the way they were portrayed in the comics. I liked the movie and I may have rated it a little high since I’ve been salivating over this summer’s lineup of movies to begin, and I might also think of it as a 3 out of 5 after I’ve seen all the other big summer movies.
It was good, but not great, and now the summer can begin!
*****POSSIBLE MINOR SPOILER*****
I saw the after credits ending where it showed Wolverine at a bar taking shots from some Japanese woman, I’ve heard they are considering making a sequel of this movie and Jackman likes the comics of Wolverine in Japan so they may go that route.
*****END POSSIBLE MINOR SPOILER*****
Oh Vic I also thought that the way Agent Zero reloaded his guns that one time was sorta stupid and unnecessary, but I think his character was somewhat arrogant and show offish so maybe it fits.
To start
@T
“What’s next, the movie where it turns out Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees were brothers, the illegitimate sons of Freddy Kruger and they are eventually brought together to prevent the Alien face-hugger that rode to earth with the crash of the first Transformer who was fleeing a Predator who was under the orders of a Sith Lord to prevent the Spice from ever leaving the AraaKis system to prevent the rise of the Dark Gods of Cuthulu from taking place….”
- I actually really want to see this movie made now haha.
@huntthejest
Just found this actually trying to learn abit about this movie.
Punisher War Zone reboot, yes – completely unnneccessary I don’t know what they were thinking, I was almost as excited for a new punisher movie as I was for this one and then I almost wanted to just turn it off. I still can’t believe I watched the entire thing.
The Incredible Hulk reboot was done perfectly. from the way it looked, tothe story, to actually mentioning the purple pants. The first one was only good cause it was shoot intrestingly…they really made it look like a comic book and all that, but thats the best i can say about it. Daredevil does get too much crap. I thought it was really good. I agree with you about Garner and the cathedral scene. But I really like Farrell and, despite being almost hurt when i heard Affleck was going to be Daredevil, I thought he was perfect for it after seeing it (which isn’t something i’d say about anything else he’s been in…except Dogma, I’ll give him props for Dogma). And hey Kingpin was perfect for it, I was just mentioning how they didn’t stick to the caracter from the comics. If they ever use kingpin again in any comic movie i hope its the same actor (forget his name).
You pretty much hit the nail on the head Vic. In fact you were a lot easier on it than I would have been. I’ll be more carefull with spoilers this time but couldn’t they have researched a cajun accent a little bit more?
@Claude
See the comment by “vid” he hits on a lot of the weak points. I don’t want to get into spoilers until this has been out a couple of weeks – but there was one scene where I thought I was watching the beginning of the first Superman movie…
Oh, but you’re right, I probably should have been harder on PWZ.
There’s more, but like I said, I don’t want to discuss spoilers. Maybe as Oscar suggested I should create a Wolverine discussion post with a big spoiler warning so people can spill to their heart’s content.
Vic
*Sigh* Is what I did after this movie was over. So many things to me where wrong, out of place, or just didn’t need to be there. In my region (Kentucky) I got the bar scene at the end. Kinda lame but, meh.
Alot of the CGI to me was bad, the claw scenes seemed bad. The scenes that switched from CGI to real was bad. Really wanted this movie to be good but got nothing from it.
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