Friday, May 1, 2009

Movie review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Fights well with others. (Briefly.)

By John P. Meyer

Pity the tormented figure of James Logan (Troye Sivan, playing the kid who will one day become Wolverine).

X-Men Origins: Wolverine depicts James as a sickly boy (in his circa 1845 youth) who receives little sympathy from his sibling, Victor "Dog" Creed (Michael-James Olsen, as the kid who will one day become Sabretooth): Victor, in fact, has a tendency to hang out in James' sick room just to gloat over his own robust salubriousness. What a guy.

A tragic incident of patricide (as all such incidents tend to be) serves as the foundation for James' guilt load, which accumulates rapidly as he and Victor serve in one nationally-sanctioned armed conflict after another (ref. the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, etc.): see, the brothers can't be killed, and they are apparently more or less immortal to boot. Having a marked tendency toward violence (it's in their - um - blood), soldiering seems to be the logical trade for them to pursue.

Growing disillusioned with the whole slaying game, Logan (now in the adult guise of Hugh Jackman) bears his economy-sized albatross necklace of remorse with ever less grace, particularly after his beastly bro begins slipping into a mindless spiral of murderous mayhem: soon, even their fellow soldiers find themselves at peril from the mutant duo.

"If you two don't straighten up we'll have to execute you. Again."

Enter Col. William Stryker (Danny Huston) as the leader of an elite corps of special operatives whose wild talents allow them to infiltrate and play havoc with the operations of the bad guys (i.e., whoever Stryker and his superiors have something against at the moment). He makes the feral brothers an offer they'll have trouble refusing, if they value their freedom (which, being feral, they of course do): join his clandestine crew and get back to killin' folks, this time in a more targeted fashion.

Sounds good to them - as opposed to, say, rotting slowly away in a prison cell.

The next bit is one of the most entertaining parts of the film, as the special-special ops boys (including Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson, master of sword kata; Will.i.am as John Wraith, part-time invisible guy; Dominic Monaghan as Bolt, who operates as a kind of switching board for electromagnetic systems; and Daniel Henney as Agent Zero, pistol-craft wizard) penetrate and take down a Lagos-based blood-diamond operation run by a despotic paramilitary leader.

We could have gone on watching missions like this (involving slo-mo bullet-dodging, acrobatic clip reloading and effortless multi-story building-climbing) for some time, but the window draws to a rapid close as Stryker deploys his hardened soldiers to a remote African village where a strange meteorite was found - and threatens to have them murder the residents if the village elder doesn't tell him where the rock from space came from. (I mean, after it came from space.)

Wouldn't you know: it's a sacred site (DANG IT!), so violence must perforce be resorted to - leading Logan to proclaim himself done with this whole people-ravaging routine. Against the heated objections of his brother, who proves more devoted to ravaging than family loyalties, Logan walks away.

Logan now experiences an idyllic Canadian interlude as he busies himself with the killing of trees instead of people. He's got a particularly nice view from his Rocky Mountain lumberjack retreat - and we mean both inside and out, given that he's taken up residence with a fetching forest lass named Kayla Silverfox (Texas-born Lynn Collins - yum!). It's all very domestically blissful, which of course would make for a less-than-thrilling episode in a Marvel entertainment franchise and thus proves short-lived.

"Scissors beat fingernails - D'OH!"

Someone is killing ex-X-Men Special Ops members, and Col. Stryker shows up in Canada to solicit Logan's help in putting that someone out of commission. It may not be too much of a spoiler to let drop that the tale takes a turns at this juncture in the fratricidal direction.

As we've come to discover by this point, both Logan and Victor have boundless regenerative abilities, and thus any antagonistic encounter between them can prove only temporarily decisive. But in terms of collateral damage, temporary can be good enough, as Logan soon discovers. Yet more guilt accumulates, this time leavened by that hoariest of all comic book plot elements: revenge.

To get an edge, so to speak, on his homicidal brother, Logan submits to the medical experimentation regimen recommended by Stryker, resulting in his (Logan's) deployment of a set of shiny new Adamantium claws - which he proceeds to demonstrate ad nauseum in almost every succeeding chapter of the drama. Again and again we see the claws burst forth - retract - then burst forth again. I mean, really, either just leave the suckers out (a la Edward Scissorhands) or forget about 'em. GET A GRIP, man! (Er, I mean...)

Wolverine eventually ferrets out the island headquarters of those responsible for turning his own life into a living heck and those of his mutant acquaintances into minions of the corrupt regime du jour, and proceeds to lay waste to the place - and, with help from his friends, to Weapon XI, which (who?) has been purpose-built to defeat him. And everyone else. But it ain't over 'til it's over, and of course being part of an ongoing series this one isn't even over at that point. But at least after 107 minutes we get to leave the theater.

Kayla leads some imprisoned X-Folk out of their prison-like holding facility. (They should have just had the guy with the laser-blast eyes blow a big hole in the place, but whatever.)

The extent to which the contemporary Hugh Jackman resembles a man-with-no-name-era Clint Eastwood cannot be overstated: the hairdo, the scowl and the intense eyes are more than just suggestive, they're practically evidence of cloning. The scowl in particular gets almost as much screentime as the Adamantium claws. (I said "almost.") Did I mention that Logan was tormented?

As a director of live-action comic book fare, Gavin Hood here performs serviceably: the fights are well choreographed, the feats of incredible derring-do are credibly derring-done. But there's nary a glimpse of the grandly-visioned, transporting quality we find in the similarly-themed works of Sam Raimi or Christopher Nolan or even Jon Favreau - nothing that springs to the forefront when we, like Mazursky's Dimitrius, proclaim: "Show me the magic!"

The plot (scripted by David Benioff and Skip Woods) gives Swiss cheese a run for its money in terms of hole coefficient, with characters interacting in unexpected (and inexplicable; and inconsistent) ways - but unlike those in Logan and Victor, these holes don't heal themselves over time: they just get holier.

Taylor Kitsch as Gambit. Our advice: don't play poker with this guy.

Wolverine is middling-good comic book fare that should keep the Marvel money machine churning out dough - at least for a couple of weeks. But it's nothing to write home about, which is just as well: those dang Adamantium claws would get in the way.

On a final positive note, I was pleased to see Taylor Kitsch - Tim Riggins from TV's Friday Night Lights - in the supporting role of Remy LeBeau (a.k.a. Gambit). Kitsch has a glowing charismatic presence and appears to be setting himself up for weightier screen appearances to come. Though we'd hate to see him leave the cast of the best network drama on television, time does in fact march on.

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