Friday, May 01, 2009

Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine


I attended the midnight showing of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It was no Ironman, but its a solid contender as a summer movie.

Earlier in this decade, a trilogy was created out of the Marvel Comic book series, the X-Men. The basic premise is that parts of humanity are evolving beyond normal men, and how they deal with their powers and how mankind deals with them.

Logan (To be Wolverine) heals, ridiculously amazingly fast.
Victor (To be Sabertooth) heals, ridiculously amazingly fast.
They are bothers. For over a century, they fight for the US in various wars, only to develop a problem with authority and be tucked away into secret weapon programs. From there, a cornucopia of plot lines emerge, culminating in a fantastic, nuclear-reactor-destroying fight on Three Mile Island, and ultimately Wolverine having no memory of anything, and restarting his life as a enraged weapon of incredible destruction,

Yes, that's a big jump. No, its not unwarranted.
That's how this movie is, a marvelously enjoyable bullet train of comic book sound and fury, tied together with the spit and bailing wire of the marvel universe.

It's special effects are iffy, much of the action is ill paced, and characters don't always behave in believable ways. But where it matters most, the Hugh Jackson's Wolverine rings true once again, as does his love of the girl (name? :/) and his brother Sabertooth.

It's also remarkably clean. No sex, innuendo, drugs, gratuitous blood, and only a spattering of coarse language throughout.

I liked it well enough, 4/10, and I'll probably get the DVD just to round out my collection.

5 comments:

Solameanie said...

Hmmm. "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury."

I'll bet you thought I wouldn't catch that literary reference, didn't you, Robert? :O

And, did you know that "The Sound and the Fury" was a very difficult novel by William Faulkner? Of course you did. Caution. Don't see the movie starring Yul Brynner. They butchered the book.

Solameanie said...

For clarity, the Faulkner book was not the origin of "sound and fury." He stole it from Shakespeare's Macbeth. Okay. I'll go away now.

No2Bpencil said...

Kayla dear, her name was Kayla

Aaron Ross said...

Kayla Silverfox. (SilverFox is also her codename)

RobertDWood said...

Joel, I didn't know it was a literary reference... I just liked the phrase. :D

Thanks Mk