X-Men Origins: Wolverine

This review is one that I feel no matter what I write I’m gonna catch shit from someone. I can go “It was a great movie” and I’ll get the purist comic assholes going “Dude, Deadpool? WTF!?” or I could go “Dude, Deadpool!? WTF!?” and get the people saying “It was a great movie!” I don’t think I can make either side of the fence happy so I’m just going to write this from the perspective of a guy in the middle.

I saw it the Saturday after it came out so I had already seen the reviews of the internet “elite” who had seen the midnight showing the night before and were all writing how it was a crappy two hour clip show featuring everyones favorite overrated mutant, Wolverine. This, however, did not deter me from seeing it as a majority of said internet elite are fucking morons.

The movie is not as disjointed and sloppy as many would have you think, it starts out a bit wobbly, but quickly finds it’s legs and delivers, at the very least, a fun action movie.

It opens to a young James Howlett, who has yet to discover his powers, fighting a sickness that he apparently always has. Upon witnessing the death of his father at the hands of Victor “Sabertooth” Creed’s father, we see his first experience with popping the claws which he uses to kill Papa Creed, who uses his dying breath to tell James that he is his real father. Making Wolverine and Sabertooth brothers. What bothered me about the opening sequence is that a James who is somewhere between 10-13 years old seems relatively calm when talking to Victor despite his entire world being turned upside down in a matter of minutes. He witnessed the death of one father, killed another father, found out his best friend is really his brother and he’s got claws. That’s a LOT for a kid to take in all at once.

The montage of James and Victor battling in various wars I thought was a cool sequence, and it even served a purpose to show Victor’s slipping into war ravaged madness while James tries to keep his cool, while also protecting his brother.

After Stryker picks Victor and James up and recruits them into his little band of mutant soldiers we get to meet the characters that get dealt with through most of the movie, and a few people have been saying that in this early scene they did Wade Wilson well as he doesn’t shut up and is constantly popping off jokes. And while the two universes characters are similar in that respect they diverge in that comic Wade  never shuts up because he’s an arrogant jerk, movie Wade felt like he was joking around out of nervousness, to try and take his own mind off of what they were doing.

Then we jump to six years later, the team has disbanded, James has changed his name to Logan, become a lumberjack in Canada, and is living with Kayla Silverfox. Meanwhile Victor is running around killing the old team. Stryker comes to Logan asking for his help, explaining that Wade Wilson and Chris “Bolt” Bradley are dead. Logan refuses to help. That is, until, Victor kills Kayla. Logan agrees to align with Stryker as long as he gets to kill Victor. He then adopts the code name Wolverine from a story Kayla tells him. After the fusion of the adamantium to his bones he becomes hunted by Strykers organization when they say they’re going to erase his memories and turn him into a weapon.

He finds an old couple that offer to take him on and who are killed by Agent Zero, which becomes a cool little “Watch things go boom” scene. Leading into Logan tracking down old teammates John Wraith and Fred Dukes. Wraith is now Dukes’s boxing manager as Dukes has become the resilient Blob. Some people felt the film fell apart here but I disagree. The boxing match between Wolverine and Blob was a silly comic relief scene that helped break up the monotony of “Watch everyone die a horrible death” while also providing a little action.

We then get to meet Remy “Gambit” LeBeau. Who was a prisoner of Stryker’s that managed to escape. And I have to say, I didn’t hate him. I feel Gambit is one of the most overrated characters in the Marvel universe but he actually served a purpose in the movie and I felt the way they represented his powers was cool.

When Wolverine tracks down Stryker and Victor, having found out they’re working together to collect mutant DNA we discover that Kayla was a double agent hired to keep tabs on Wolverine and she has the ability to manipulate the mind of anyone she touches. But that she was only working for them because they had imprisoned her little sister Emma (Frost) They free all the young mutants, including a young Scott “Cyclops” Summers, and run into the reason they were collecting the Mutant DNA, Deadpool. They had injected the various DNAs into Wade and turned him into a super-mutant with the collected powers of all he’d been injected with. Is it Deadpool from the comics? Not even close. But, this isn’t the comics. And I feel that with what the X-Men movie-verse has given us, it fit. So I didn’t have a problem with it. And it lead to a very cool and fast fight scene between he, Wolverine and Victor.

After the kids escape, being picked up by Charles Xavier, played by returning Patrick Stewart sporting an awful makeup job to young him up a bit, and dispatching Deadpool, Stryker pops Wolverine in the head with an adamantium bullet that would scramble his brain enough to make him forget everything. Didn’t like that so much. Adamantium is supposed to be indestructible when hardened, meaning the bullets, in theory, should have just ricocheted off. But we’re explaining the workings of a fictional product so I don’t think one can really say that it wouldn’t have worked. I just personally don’t think it SHOULD have worked.

One glaring problem I have with the movie is that the relationship between Wolverine and Sabertooth is so important to the story, yet in the first X-Men film they barely touch on them having any knowledge of each other. I would figure at least Sabertooth would remember and say something. But overall it was not a bad movie. The comic geeks will say otherwise but like all comic movies, this isn’t necessarily made for them. Will people who don’t know the comic Deadpool dislike the movie Deadpool because they’re so different? Probably not because I’m willing to bet 90% of the people who see this movie don’t know who the fuck comic Deadpool is.

What the comic nerds absolutely need to stop doing is comparing how the movies tie in with the comics because THEY DON’T! Characters are going to act and look differently. Stories are going to be told differently. GET OVER IT! If you want the story and characters that were in the comics, go read the comics! They’re still there as they always were. Read a book, asshole!

Tags: Cyclops, Deadpool, Emma Frost, James Howlett, Logan, Marvel, Origins, Sabertooth, Scott Summers, Silverfox, The Blob, Victor Creed, Wade Wilson, Weapon X, Wolverine, X-Men

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.