Review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) by Diego T — 30 Aug 2013

As part of my epic roast of all the X-Men movies, I was forced to put myself through one of the stupidest movies ever made: X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Usually, when a movie is made that has no brain to it whatsoever, it will at least have good action or special effects to back it up. This movie has no redeeming values at all. It is a loud, clunky, boring extravaganza of bad special effects and utterly bland performances. At one point, I got so incredibly bored, I had to pause it and play the piano for a few minutes just to engage my brain a little. Make no mistake-- this movie will kill your brain cells if you're not careful.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the story of how the X-Men's most popular hero came into being. This is actually a worthy story to tell, as Wolverine is the coolest and most interesting of all of the X-Men. Instead of being a one-dimensional prop like Cyclops or Storm, he actually seems to have some depth at times in the original three X-Men movies. If only this story had been told with a little more reverence for the mythology. At the beginning, we see Wolverine with his bone-claws played by a horrible child actor who 'accidentally' stabs his own dad to death. Whoops. The movie then proceeds to zip through about 150 years of Wolverine going to war with his brother, Sabertooth (played by Liev Schreiber). This is a cool sequence, but the movie literally gets no better than this. A word of advice to filmmakers: Don't put the most interesting part of your movie at the beginning, and definitely don't fast-forward through it during the OPENING FUCKING CREDITS.

After partaking in the Vietnam War, Wolverine and his brother are found by a military general (the generic bad guy from X2) who wants to use them and a group of other mutants to hunt down people around the world for various unexplained reasons. This group is basically the ass end of Marvel's characters, not to mention the fact that fucking Deadpool is played by Ryan Reynolds... aaaargh. Anyway, after supposedly killing hundreds of people throughout history, Wolverine finally says "I can't do this anymore" for no reason whatsoever, and leaves the group. He then proceeds to walk around Canada with his annoying girlfriend for the next hour of the movie, cutting down trees, walking around in a lumberjack shirt, and facing horrible dilemmas like assholes blocking bridges with their trucks. So fucking involving.

Eventually, his brother comes back to kill him for whatever reason, and they fight in the most boring way possible. Seriously, Hugh Jackman just looks incredibly bored during these scenes. It's ridiculous. To combat his brother, he gets the adamantium grafted onto his skeleton, and becomes the version of Wolverine we all know. Several battles proceed, involving bad CGI ladders, bad CGI helicopters, bad CGI green-screen explosions, and bad CGI zoom-ins. Here's where I get really pissed, because nobody expects an X-Men movie to really have fucking Shakespeare as its dialogue. The reason people see these is for their special effects. And X-Men Origins: Wolverine offers nothing of the sort. This is a movie to turn on when nobody's home, sit back, and laugh out loud at. It's really that bad.

In the end, the movie tries to convince us that Wolverine is somehow responsible for the Three-Mile Island incident, which is basically around the time I stopped giving a shit about what was going on and just tried to have a good time. But where this really begins to piss me off is... *rubs temples*... what they did to Deadpool. I am not a big fan of superheroes, but Deadpool is one of my favorites. He is basically unkillable, which makes his comics more comedic than anything else. He's the merc with a mouth, and he yells at people, makes wisecracks, and generally does whatever he wants. Imagine my disappointment when:

1) He is played by Ryan Reynolds, the bane of superhero movies.

2) Instead of being the merc with a mouth, his mouth is LITERALLY sewn shut.

3) He is giving a wide range of stupid-ass powers that nobody knew he had, from teleportation to weird magical eyeshadow via a superpower-transferring system that nobody knew existed.

4) He is controlled by a computer and used as the military's bitch. LAME!

The performances in this movie are beyond boring, they're downright coma-inducing. Nobody thought to put even the tiniest bit of effort into this piece of shit, and it shows. The CGI somehow looks WORSE than it did in the first X-Men movie, the acting is just awful, the dialogue ("I have great respect for you I do") is atrocious, and there is just not a lick of fun to be had in the movie unless it's at the film's expense. I do feel kind of sorry for it, as it wasn't TRYING to be stupid. This isn't a movie where the directors said "Oooh, hee hee hee, let's make a really stupid movie and the idiotic audiences will eat it up!" No, this is just the result of gleeful, unchecked ineptitude. Final Score for X-Men Origins: Wolverine: 2/10 stars. It's fun as a stupid movie to watch and point out plot inconsistencies while you do so, but this is not even enjoyable as a guilty pleasure. Hilariously bad.