Broken Frontier

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not a terrible film, but it’s burdened with so many inexcusable flaws that it’s impossible to fully recommend. Released May 1, the film officially kicked off the summer 2009 movie season. The good news is that things can only get better from here.

A prequel to Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000), Wolverine chronicles the early days of Marvel’s most popular mutant. We see James Howlett (Hugh Jackman) and his half-brother Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber) survive through multiple American wars—from the Civil War to both World Wars to Vietnam—thanks to their healing abilities, which also grant them extraordinarily long life spans. Noticing their unique talents, Colonel William Stryker (Danny Huston) enlists James and Victor into an elite team of mutant mercenaries. However, on one particular mission in Nigeria, James turns his back on his more bloodthirsty teammates for a quiet life in Canada as a lumberjack with the lovely Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). Now known only as Logan, things seem to be pretty uneventful for the bone-clawed badass until Stryker tracks him down with news that someone is hunting down the former members of his team. After a fateful and violent visit from Victor, who’s been apparently slaughtering his teammates, Logan makes a deal with Stryker: If the colonel can make him indestructible, then Logan’s going to go after Victor with everything he’s got. Logan’s skeleton is reinforced with adamantium, and Wolverine is born.

Up to this point, Wolverine is a fairly serviceable origin story, although it does tamper with some of the film series’ own continuity. In X2: X-Men United (2003), we caught glimpses of Wolverine’s adamantium procedure and his escape from the Alkali Lake facility. Why, then, are these scenes completely different here? It would be foolish to think that Wolverine would go to any great lengths to completely adhere to the source material—the original three films already distanced themselves enough from the comic universe to be considered entirely separate—but the fact that it disregards continuity established just six years earlier is a concern for those of us paying attention. The film doesn’t even bother to explain why Victor, aka Sabretooth, bears no similarity to Tyler Mane’s hulking portrayal of the character in the original X-Men film. Can we look forward to an awkward explanation in a future prequel/sequel?

After Wolverine escapes from Stryker’s Alkali Lake laboratory, things really begin to unravel. There’s a quaint, humorous sequence in which a naked Wolverine shacks up with an elderly couple followed by an explosive showdown with Stryker’s men, but the rest of the film just seems to go through the motions. There’s a boxing match between Wolverine and Fred Dukes, aka the Blob (Kevin Durand), a New Orleans street fight with fan-favorite Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) and a third act that falls flat despite its bombast. Things happen, sure, but we’re given no reason to care about what’s going on.

It’s always great when comic book films include beloved characters as a tip of the hat to hardcore fans, but when they’re haphazardly realized on-screen it comes off as insulting. Kitsch’s Gambit is little more than a glorified cameo appearance, leaving fans feeling short-changed while non-fans will wonder why this seemingly important character is introduced so late in the story to do so little. Director Gavin Hood and writers David Benioff and Skip Woods seem to have gone to great lengths to make this story palatable to mainstream audiences while appeasing fans. They accomplish neither, and the end result is as frenzied and overstuffed as it is bland.

Lackluster storytelling can usually be forgiven if the special effects deliver, but Wolverine never even looks all that impressive. Much of computer-generated imagery—particularly during the final action sequences on Three Mile Island—has a plastic sheen that makes the film look cheap. At times, even Wolverine’s iconic claws look poorly rendered in ways that were never apparent in the previous X-Men films.

It’s a shame that Wolverine is such a mediocre installment in this franchise, because Jackman really does a phenomenal job with the material he’s working with. Even when the rest of the film is falling apart around him, there’s never a moment when he doesn’t seem fully committed to the role, balancing Wolverine’s intense animalistic tendencies with genuine humanity. It’s hard to picture anyone else playing this character, and one hopes that Jackman returns for another, better Wolverine film in the future. Schreiber is also noteworthy as Wolverine’s lifelong nemesis, even if he’s given little to do aside from snarling, jumping around and showing off his intimidating fingernails.

Will some people enjoy Wolverine? Perhaps. It’s never as good as Singer’s X-Men or X2, and while this is not saying much, it may be slightly better than Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). But overall, this film is a major disappointment.