X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The latest installment in the X-Men franchise, X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a pleasant surprise.  I had feared it would be an overblown bore, but it turned out to be a fun ride, full of action, good visual effects, and a decent emotional payback.

Hugh Jackman, for the fourth time, plays Wolverine with the usual mix of strength, animal instincts, and human emotions.  In what has become the norm for a movie from the X-Men universe, a sprawling cast of characters surrounds our hero.  Unfortunately, these many new faces, again in keeping with X-Men tradition, aren’t always given enough time or space to develop.

That’s a pity, because these new characters all possess cool new powers that any fan of the franchise would love to see more of, but it’s also understandable that the constraints of the medium limit the time available for every plot line’s expansion.

The script tells us where Wolverine comes from, what his life experience has been like, and how he turned into the mutant we  know from the previous three X-Men movies.  It was actually quite cool to see how the script brought into focus the blurred backstory set up in the franchise’s other chapters with regards to Wolverine -- like how he got recruited into the military program that gave him an Adamantium skeleton or how he came to suffer from amnesia when he’s enrolled by Professor Xavier to fight Magneto’s evil schemes.

Liev Schreiber plays Sabretooth, Wolverine’s brother, and is excellent in the part of the mutant who cynically gives in to his wild nature because that’s who he was born to be.  Ryan Reynolds plays Wade/Deadpool with panache and grave inevitability respectively.  And Danny Huston plays Col. Stryker with a terrifying determination to rid the world of all mutants.

Virtually all the other mutants’ abilities are cool and attention grabbing, but they barely get a chance to display them.  It’s also a little puzzling to get introduced to a young Cyclops, whom we’ve already seen plenty of in the X-Men trilogy, when this isn’t his origin story.  Why waste his appearance?  Yes, they needed his powers for Deadpool, but still, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Anyway, overall the movie is good and the story solid, so I would recommend it to all fans and to whoever is looking for a good action movie.

Grade: 8