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Horrigins
A review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine

There are valuable life lessons to be learnt from the colossally proclaimed treasure trove of rotting cheese that is Hollywood, and just today, I learnt that things in life tend to work themselves out as long as you snarl a lot and have the ability to sprout bone claws from your knuckles.

And that seems to be what the entire of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is about. The entire movie can be very aptly summed up as Hugh Jackman snarling a lot and stabbing people, and when he's not stabbing people, partaking in all manner of socially unacceptable actions and brooding in the dark shirtless. In an attempt to really highlight his pursuits of the intellectual, he takes a merry jog across a meadow naked.

But Jackman's revelations aside, there are many things to be said about this movie, and they're best said after acknowledging that there are two possible audiences for this film.

The first is inevitably the armies of X-Men fandom that walk amongst us unseen. Quite fortunately, I don't happen to be a part of this demographic all that much. My background knowledge about Wolverine and the other mutants that star in this series of moving pictures is best summed up as everything that's on Wikipedia, and easily accessible to anyone who's looking for some entertainment if Youtube videos won't load at a pace that isn't rivalled by that of the Blob's. (Alright, alright, I just found out after reading the wikipedia article on the Blob that he's able to run fairly fast. But shut up now, this only proves my point.)

The second possible audience for this film is consists of anyone who's looking for a spectacular potpourri of explosions, sparks, and people leaping at each other while yelling battle cries that would make Leonidas cringe.

The third completely non-existent (statistically) audience is composed of hopefuls that think that there's the potential that Origins might actually have a decent amount of character development and intellectually stimulating dialogue. To get a better idea of my opinion on this after watching the movie, picture someone hoping that the movie will possess the aforementioned qualities, in the form of a thought bubble hovering about their heads. Now picture this thought bubble being viciously shredded to pieces by a furious Hugh Jackman who is now standing behind the doomed hopeful while panting very, very heavily, claws fully extended.

Allow me to explain this whole thing by giving a bit of an introduction to the movie. Origins covers the a-bit-of-a-bloody-giveaway origins of the mutant Wolverine, from X-Men, who possesses the ability to sprout bone claws from his knuckles and regenerate a ridiculous amount of flesh and bone (No, really. I'm not just referring to the inexplicable protagonist shield. He really does have this power.) It basically starts off with him as a rather sickly child sulking in the 19th century. His fate as a the subject of a blockbuster movie allows him to live all the way till the present day while looking exactly the same, all the while slaughtering chockloads of people with his half brother Sabertooth. Eventually the snarling duo join some secret government team of mutants and go around abusing African villagers, which upsets Wolverine deep inside his fuzzy heart and makes him leave.

You can see precisely where this is going.

I can't really give away anymore of the storyline because that would spoil the entire thing, but thank goodness that isn't really possible, since Origins is going to disappoint hardcore comic fans and anyone who so much dares to hope for a storyline. Comic canon is broken even more than the realism of the human physique in this movie, and the storyline is can essentially be summed up as a series of events, which in all of them, Wolverine gets extremely angry at a particular person and proceeds to try and stab him, while slaughtering and intimidating boring, blank slates of ordinary people and other mutants. The whole thing simply feels like an excuse for Hugh Jackman to rip things apart while snarling. The whole thing seems to be stitched together and even Hugh Jackman's regenerative abilities wouldn't save it.

But I hear you say "Ah, but kind sir. Is that not a perfectly legitimate direction for a blockbuster movie to take? Things blowing up and innocent African villages being terrorized are perfectly acceptable forms of entertainment." This would have been fine (except the terrorising of African villagers.) had it been executed with more flair. During the course of this automated beat em' up, Wolverine performs many action movie staples, such as being chased by a chopper while on a bike, and then proceeding to destroy both to an equal extent, despite the fact that he wasn't even trying to do that to one of them. He does plenty of pouncing and stabbing and so on, but all of it feels rather bland and doesn't feel like anything we haven't already seen. Most of the action is really just composed of Wolverine or his brother being stabbed in someplace nasty, which the audience responds to by cringing and making a plethora of supposedly sympathizing sounds, but that's all there is to the action. This is inevitably trouble since that's all there might have had been to begin with.

So that's what the entire thing is: A series of rather bland action scenes stitched together by a dilute storyline that swooshes down the drain without much fuss. If you've got ten dollars or so that you need to desperately rid yourself off because they have a terrible secret written on them that marks you as the target for some undoubtedly religiously funded organization of assassins, then by all means, purchase a ticket for X-Men Origins: Wolverine and leave the cinema pondering that maybe fleeing from those assasins in the two hours spent watching the film would have been vastly more thrilling.