X Men Origins: Wolverine

In most cases I try to eschew movie reviews of current Hollywood releases until after I've seen a film. This is mostly because for purposes of this blog, I like to form my own fresh opinions. Sometimes if I read an interesting thought about a movie in a review, I will go out of my way to think of something even fresher and more clever, and the contortions are not always pretty.

But when a movie like X-Men Origins: Wolverine makes ninety million bucks in its opening weekend, and I don't get around to seeing it for a whole week, word starts leaking out in the blogs. I can't help but notice when there is a trend hinting that a movie, well, sucks.

So I knew going into this movie not to expect too much. But I'd just seen Terra (see previous review), and had built up a cast iron stomach for sucky fantasy. Why not cross off two of them on one trip to the Tyngsboro AMC, while matinee prices were still in effect?

At least I'd get to see some thrilling action scenes, and certainly the story had to be better than the movie I'd just seen.

To make a long story short, I spent the first third of this movie thinking, "Well this ain't so bad, maybe." It didn't knock me over, but it wasn't turning my stomach either.

But then things just went south. The story just started to rot, like day old garbage, and the end of the movie, as I would later tell a friend of mine on Facebook, I felt like I'd eaten "a merde sandwich."

What went wrong? It certainly wasn't the acting. Hugh Jackman was fine enough for me, given what he was supposed to do. Yet I was scratching my head in wonderment that this is how he follows up his Academy Awards hosting gig, that catapulted him to the A-list of current stars. Well, of course, he couldn't have known the timing would work out this way. But cripes, what a waste.

And Liev Schreiber, whom I liked very much in Defiance, was wasted as well, in a movie which will nevertheless make him much more of a household word, and even give him his own 7-11 action figure.

Nope it was the story, plain and simple, as it always is when a movie really sucks. And unlike the case with Terra, where digging into the corpse felt like a wasteful exercise, somehow dissecting this turkey feels like a fruitful exercise.

The main deficiency that really stuck out to me is one that I constantly harp on as being the general weakness of Postmodern cinema, which is that the character motivations are so often kept swirling in the morass of the sewer. Everyone in this movie seems driven by the basest of instincts. You'd think this would work, given that the movie is about beast-men mutants, but actually it just makes it worse, and proves that beast-men characters probably need higher motivations than usual, if the story is going to work at all.

Instead, the motivation of the title character (Jackman) never really rises above the level of revenge. The tone is set in an opening scene, the significance of which is never really explained. We just learn that the characters are dangerous, and prone to outbursts like hypermedicated children.

The title character actually seems happy until he balks at massacring civilians for the government. He doesn't put up too much of a protest, however, but just walks away. Afterward he seems perfectly content until his own mate is killed, and then he goes ballistic to shed the blood of those who wronged him. That's it---the whole shebang, the reason why every else happens in the movie. Even when, at the end of the story, we finally get the glimmer of any sort of higher motivation (mutant liberation), it doesn't really contribute much to the story.

The title character's nemesis, his brother and a fellow mutant (Schreiber), has even more mysterious motivations. He's a mad dog, er, cat, I guess. Period. End of story. Somehow in fighting many wars for America, he, like the Comedian in Watchmen, acquires a taste for rape and murder and thus becomes bad. It's all we're given as far as why he does what he does, and why he hates his brother. Oh, I guess, we learn he has an ulterior motive to help the bad guys, but like the mutant liberation part, it almost comes as an afterthought, long after the character has been established.

I think the worse part about this is that in 2009, we're just supposed to buy all of this without question. We're all beasts, after all, right? None of us really has any higher motivations than nihilistic plunder or possibly revenge. Wolverine is realism, ya see? That's the Postmodern voice of lies talking again.

But oh yes, there is indeed goodness as well. At the end, the nihilistic brother, instead of killing the good title character when he has the chance, comes to his rescue because, get this, no one is allowed to kill his brother but him, and, more importantly brothers have each other's back.

Is your head spinning yet? Nihilism reigns supreme in our souls, so much that we will kill our family members, but if someone else tries to kill them, bloodline connections become all important, and the tribe instinct kicks in. Grrrrrr!

My god, we are not only in the gutter, but swirling down into the treatment plant.

Please don't think I'm just moralizing here. The more important point here is that wallowing in base character motivations makes for inferior stories, ones that are disatisfying to watch, and leave you feeling like you ate, well, you get the picture.

There are other things wrong with the story as well. For one thing, too many characters get killed. Every time you get to like some one, they get offed. After the scene in the barn with the old couple and the motorcycle jacket, I pretty much had my verdict for this film in mind.

There was no reason for what happened in that scene to happen. We already had outrage. We didn't need more at that point. All it did was alert me to be on the watch for any character sympathy to build up, because I knew that character would be killed.

There were a few things here and there about the movie that I liked. The dark portrayal of high-level corruption in the United States military is always welcome in my book. Too bad the public still thinks of it as a fantasy.

The effects involving Schreiber jumping around like a cat are sometimes fun to watch. Moreover the CGI effects at the end involving the nuclear power plant were original and enjoyable to watch, even though they had been partly spoiled by the trailers.

Spoiled, yes. That's the right word for the stench left in my nostrils, the dead carcass of a rotting animal of unspecified species.