Summer '09 - Blockbuster #1 - "Wolverine"

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t too impressed with “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”.  Hugh Jackman is fine (as always) as the titular mutant.  Danny Huston does a good job as Stryker, the baddie responsible for Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton.  And Liev Schrieber is having a enjoyable time chewing scenery as Wolverine’s buddy/nemesis Sabretooth.  Sadly, none of the other mutants really shine as characters: a hobbit who can control electricity, a rapper who can teleport, a guy with swords, a guy with guns, a really fat guy whose power is… I’m not quite sure what that guy is for.  It seemed less like a carefully structured, character driven story (as I thought of all the previous X-Men films), and more like a marketing tie-in to remind us of the breadth of the X-Men universe as told through eleven billion comic books.

 

For a tent pole, summer, sci-fi, effects-heavy, action spectacle, it was a little boring in spots.  I appreciate that they managed to maintain the mythology laid down by the previous films… sort of.  (It’s never satisfactorily explained why Sabretooth is such a dim-witted, one-note character by the time “X-Men” rolls around, when he’s a sly one with a complicated back-story here.)  And one enjoyable cameo made me smile.

 

There are a number of very cool action sequences, and I never felt bounced out of the story.  But still, all in all, it was merely good, not great.