After 3 X-Men films, the bigwigs in Hollywood have decided that public needs to see yet more of Marvels moodiest mutant, Wolverine. For those that don’t know, that’s the one who looks like what I can only imagine Gary Glitter (in his 70′s “heyday”) would have looked like had he been a wrestler in the WWF. Just add metal blades. Back to the point, the movie sets out to give us a backstory, some kind of understanding to the Wolverine we see in all the X-Men films, and it does, kinda….
It starts with Wolverine and his brother, Sabretooth (Victor), fighting thier way through all the big wars in history (Civil War, WW1/WW2 and Vietnam, did Canadians even fight in Vietnam?), this hastily sums up a big part of the movie. That Wolverine and Sabretooth are utterly indestructable. It kinda reminded me of the Matrix sequels, where you’d have Neo fighting hordes of agents for 15 minutes, only to realise that nobody can actually die or get hurt, this obviously detracts from the story, as you never feel that Wolverine is any peril. On the flip side, theres the horrendously sappy way in which he gets the name “Wolverine”, cue his standard femme-fatal-love-interest’s gay story about “The Moon and The Wolverine” or somethin’. These kind of things (invincible heroes, one dimentional love interest) are pretty much abundant in modern action flicks, so it’s not surprising, just not very good/entertaining either, unless you’re seeing this kind of thing for the first time, aka you’re an 8 year old.
Ok so the plots predictable and the characters arrn’t fleshed out very well, you could gather that just by looking at the cast (Will-I-Am is in it, end of story). However as with the other X Men films, it was always cool to spot the mutant with the best power. First up you have Charlie from Lost, he plays a guy that can control what looks like electrics with his mind, aka stopping/starting elevators, turning on lights an stuff. Pretty lame in the macho fueled world of “Wolverine” where you have Van Wilder(Ryan Reynolds) playing Deadpool, the wisecracking, samurai sword welding uber-mercenary, no wonder Charlie from Lost looks likes he’s one second shy of shitting himself the whole movie through. Now onto Cyclops and Gambit, two characters a bit more integral to the X-Men franchise. Cyclops is introduced as a bit of a weedy kid in high school, later forced to wear a bandage round his eyes in order to stop laser beams from coming out of his eyes and tearin’ shit up. As future leader of the X-Men , they kinda pay homage to him in the movie by having him make “leaders” decisions, desicions such as blindly, literally blindly guessing which way him and his band of captured mutants will go in order to escape the clutches of the main antagonist, Colonel Stryker. Cos this is what leaders do, make snap decisions with conviction and confidence, based on absolutely nothing at all. Moving on. Gambit, apparantly a fanboys fave (I don’t read the comics, honest!), is in it. This guy gives out more cards than Graham Poll, but instead of waving them about flamboyantly, he charges them with “energy” and proceeds to fling them at unsuspecting foes. He does this to Wolverine, albeit for nothing more than a kodak moment, as Wolverine shrugs it off and proceeds on his rampage.
I could go on and talk about the plot more, but you’ve heard it/seen it before, and this isnt a real review anyways, but it’s got that prequally happy ending, where all immidiate enemies are vanquished, yet theres still that feeling of “this is only the beginning” etc etc etc. It’s ok, no worse than any of the previous X-Men films, not much better either, best go see it on an Orange Wednesday, half price innit. BawussTalk.
