Movie Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)–**

Let’s hope that X-Men Origins: Wolverine isn’t a sign of things to come this summer. This fourth film in the X-Men franchise, a prequel to the first three films, is about as boring as a summer blockbuster can be without being insufferable. It’s a stale popcorn movie.

Not that it comes as a shock to anyone who saw the decidedly average X-Men: The Last Stand, a film rushed into theaters with little consideration for story or character. Yet, for all that film’s flaws, I couldn’t call it boring. Wolverine fails because it took the third X-Men film’s biggest weakness, Wolverine, and tried to structure a story around him.

Wolverine follows Logan (Hugh Jackman) as he and his brother Victor (Liev Schreiber) as the two mutants try to find their place in the world. Both were born in the late-19th century and find that their similar healing powers make them perfect soldiers. An unexciting credit sequence fills us in on the pair’s history in the trenches and Victor’s gradual development into a blood-thirsty killer.

After Victor goes on a rampage and murders a senior officer in Vietnam, both Victor and Logan face a firing squad. When they survive the barrage, the sinister Col. William Stryker (Danny Huston) recruits the pair for a special unit full of people like them. The unit’s objective is a mystery to all involved, with the exception of Stryker. Soon the group members find themselves killing civilians for information on the origin of a mysterious metal. Victor likes the blood. Logan doesn’t.

The problems begin here, when an indignant Wolverine storms off leaving behind his brother and the unit. He’s an emotional loose cannon, someone you don’t want to have on your side in a fight because he’s really just out for himself. This isn’t a newly discovered quality, but it makes it hard to root for Wolverine as the film’s only hero when you have to back a guy who wouldn’t back you.

The righteousness in any X-Men story has always been found in the supporting cast. Here the film is packed full of equally unsympathetic characters who are, like Wolverine, played by guys too talented to take on the roles. Schreiber plays a fierce Victor, but he’s an actor, not an action star. Compare that to the Sabretooth from the first film, played by a professional wrestler with more bite than bark, and you begin to see a film that takes itself too seriously to be any fun at all.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is no The Dark Knight, which wasn’t very fun either but had interesting character dynamics and a director whose previous work matched the subject matter thematically. Here Gavin Hood, the director of the overrated Tsotsi and a War on Terror film no one wanted to see, is overwhelmed by the challenge of structuring a film around a character as primal as Wolverine. Worse, though, is his inability to make the action scenes (and there are plenty of them) even moderately exciting.

Hardcore fans are likely to be unhappy with the way classic characters like Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) and Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) are frittered away in service of such a lousy storyline. Audiences will be equally disappointed by special “Easter egg endings” that Fox added to get people into the theater after a rough cut of the leaked onto the Internet. Unhappy, disappointed, and bored. That pretty much sums up the most common ways you’ll react to watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the first thoroughly mundane comic book movie to come out since the original X-Men brought about a superhero cinema renaissance nine years ago.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, starring Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, directed by Gavin Hood, is in theaters now.