Review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) by Kevin R — 14 Oct 2018

This movie was awful. I really hate this movie. This movie should have at least a 35% RT audience score. The movie's plot is lacking. They fucked up Wolverine's origin story. How could the writers screw up Wolverine's backstory? Wolverine and Sabertooth are brothers in this film! They're not supposed to be brothers! They were never brothers in the comics! They were never related to each other in the comics! The first scene where James and Victor are kids, they never got to explain who and why that strange man was pretending to be his father or why his real father never took him in custody.

Many questions left unanswered. So later James and Victor both run away from home and years later they become adults and are fighting in wars like the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War.

Tyler Mane (who played Sabretooth in X-Men) should've reprised his role as Sabretooth/Victor Creed in this movie. They should not have recast Sabretooth. After the Vietnam War, Logan and Victor both have their hands tied behind a pole, how and why did they let those other soldiers tie them to those poles and let them shoot them for like 10 hours or whatever (as mentioned later when they were in prison)? William Stryker comes to visit Logan and Victor in prison to recruit them to his special team of mutant mercenaries called Team X (even though that name was never mentioned in the movie, only in the comics).

They're in an airplane with Team X flying to Lagos, Nigeria. We're introduced to Team X. The only good thing about that boring airplane scene was Ryan Reynolds as the wise-cracking mercenary, Wade Wilson.

So when they're in Lagos, Nigeria, Agent Zero and Wade Wilson are the only badass mutants their. Victor was climbing on top of a building doing nothing. When Wade stabbed two Nigerian soldiers with his swords, there wasn't any blood on them.

That was just bad editing. Stryker asks the bad Nigerian businessman where he got the rock from. He told him that he got it from a village three days from where they are. So later Team X goes to the village and Stryker interrogates one of the villagers there into telling them where the precious rock came from.

He tells them it came from the sky, but Stryker wants to know more in detail where he found it. The villager just then tells them that it's sacred. Then Stryker orders Team X to kill them all, so Victor murders that villager by snapping his neck and Agent Zero shoots at them.

Logan tries stopping them from killing all of them. So Logan then quits and leaves the team. That's the last time we ever see Team X all working together in the movie. Team X was such a huge disappointment in this movie.

Team X's relationship with each other was severely underdeveloped. Hugely missed opportunity. 6 years later we see Logan in Canada with his girlfriend, Kayla Silverfox. One night she tells him a love story about a wolverine who was in love with the moon.

Sounds ridiculous, right? Anyways, that's where Logan later got his nickname from. He got his nickname from a cheesy love story. The next day, Kayla is driving back home from work, but Victor stands in front of her menacingly while she is in the car in middle of the road.

She stops the car when she sees him. Victor menacingly walks towards her and scrapes the front of the car with his claws. While Logan was working in the woods as a lumberjack chopping down trees for a living to earn money, he smells his brother Victor's scent nearby like about a mile away.

He runs towards the scent as fast as possible and sees Kayla's car and notices Victor's claw scratch markings on it. He runs in the woods and finds a head of a decapitated wolverine (which obviously meant that Sabretooth decapitated a wolverine).

He finally finds Kayla's dead body on the ground. He expresses his devastation by screaming out loud. Later at night, he goes to a bar to seek vengeance on his brother Victor for murdering his girlfriend.

Logan gets defeated by Victor. That fight was underwhelming. It was too short and the lack of blood was very unsatisfying. This movie should've been rated R for blood and gore. It was a huge mistake to make this movie PG-13.

So the next day, Logan is taken to a hospital after being injured in the fight. By the time he was on the coma, he already healed because of his regeneration ability. Stryker shows up and offers Logan a way to defeat Victor.

He tells him that the experiment will be the most painful experience in his life. So Logan follows Stryker to the Weapon X facility. He lays in the Adamantium tank, but there are huge continuity errors.

... The Adamantium tank in his flashbacks in X-Men and X-Men 2 was filled with green water. And the Weapon X facility was straight up pitch black and very dark inside which made it look scary and sinister.

While he was in the Adamantium tank during the flashbacks in the first two X-Men movies, he was surrounded by Army majors and a whole bunch of scientists wearing hazmat suits and masks. At the end of his last flashbacks in X2, he rose out of the water and was killing a few scientists near him next to the tank by clawing them.

For a split one or 2 seconds the Army officers were running downstairs to stop Wolverine from escaping the facility. Then Wolverine while all naked and bloody was in the spillway screaming and opened the door out of the spillway and facility escapes from Weapon X.

This prequel spin-off got it all wrong. In this movie it wasn't like any of that. It hardly resembled his flashbacks in X1 and in X2. It was light inside Weapon X. There were only a few scientists and Stryker on the balcony in front of and above Logan, None of the scientists were wearing hazmat suits and masks.

There were only a few Army officers. The water in the Adamantium tank was clear instead of green. When Wolverine rose from the Adamantium tank after hearing Stryker planning to erase his memories, he didn't kill any scientists while in the Adamantium tank.

He got out of the Adamantium tank and only killed a couple of Army officers. Then while he's still naked and not bloody at all, escapes and makes a big X with his claws out of the door and jumps off the waterfall.

Then later after that, in the second act while he's still naked, runs into a barn on a farm that belongs to an old couple. The old couple were named Travis and Heather Hudson. They took him in and let Logan stay in their house for the night.

When Wolverine was in the bathroom, he ejected his metal Adamantium claws out and looked at them in the mirror. The CGI claws was ATROCIOUS. They looked like cartoon claws! So when he scratches his claws together, Travis knocks on the bathroom door which startled Wolverine so much that he accidentally cut off the sink and one of the pipes in the bathroom (which was just stupid slapstick humor).

Travis asked him if he was alright in there and Wolverine responded by telling him that he was fine. Travis told him that supper was ready for him on the table. Later, Logan walks to the dinner table while holding the broken bathroom sink in his hands.

Travis' wife Heather was pretty shocked to see him holding the bathroom sink broken in his hands. Logan tells him that he swears that he's going to pay for it. The farmer, Travis, tells him to just set it down the table next to the table where they were sitting at to eat.

So the next morning, Agent Zero assassinates the poor innocent old couple by sniping them from very far away and frames Wolverine for murdering them. So Stryker;s military team somehow found Wolverine at the barnyard.

So the helicopter shoots two missiles at the barn and blew it up to kill Wolverine, but he makes it out of the barn just in the nick of time on the motorcycle. I'll admit, the helicopter action sequence was a bit cool, but the awful CGI and the lack of blood and gore was severely underwhelming.

And something cheesy and cliche happens at the end of that action scene. Wolverine cuts the wire with one of his claws and causes the helicopter to explode which kills Agent Zero and while the helicopter explodes Wolverine walks away without looking back.

Very cliche. Then later he visits John Wraith in a gym (which he runs) in Las Vegas. He asks what happened to Victor after he left their team in Africa. Wraith tells him that Victor felt like he was betrayed by everyone who quit and left the team.

Warith revealed that he quit the team too a couple of months after Logan left and quit the team. Wraith said it was because he couldn't keep rounding up the mutants. Wraith reveals to Logan that Team X back in Africa were hunting their own kind, mutants.

He said they did it because Stryker told them that they'd be making a difference. Wolverine shows Wraith his Adamantium claws. Wraith asks him what Weapon X did to him and Wolverine just tells him not to ask.

Logan told Wraith that Agent Zero said something about an island and asks Wraith if he knows anything about that island and he said he doesn't know. John tells him that maybe Fred Dukes knows because he and Agent Zero were really tight.

So later, Logan asks Fred where the island is and he refused to tell him. Logan calls him "bub" and Fred thought he called him "blob" which infuriates him, so he belly bumps Logan out of the ring.

Such a stupid way to get the nickname "the Blob" in the movie because in the comics, Fred Dukes is a fat mutant (that is an X-Men villain) who is tough and has a bullet-proof fat body (except for the head) and is nicknamed "The Blob".

So Wolverine decides to have a boxing match against the Blob. He boxes the Blob. It's such a stupid scene. He soon defeats the Blob and interrogates him to make him tell him where the island is at.

The Blob tells him that Victor is with Stryker on the island. Wait, what? He never asked where Victor was so why did he just randomly tel him that Victor is with Stryker or will be with him on the island? Wraith asks him what Stryker's endgame is.

The Blob tells him that they're taking other mutants' powers and combining them somehow. Wolverine gets really pissed and asks him where the island is, but the Blob says that Stryker kept the location of the island a big secret.

But then he tells him that he knows a guy who knows where the island is. He tells him that it's an escaped prisoner named Remy Lebeau who's nicknamed Gambit and lives in New Orleans. So Logan and Wraith leave the gym and head to New Orleans to find Remy Lebeau.

The tone was so inconsistent. It goes from 0 to 100 really quick. It goes from a stupid slapstick comedy to a serious edgy drama scene quickly. So when they head to New Orleans, they see Gambit in a casino playing poker.

Logan decides to play poker with Gambit and asks him nicely where the island is. But Gambit then notices that Logan is wearing a dog tag. It reminds him of the ones that the people wore that imprisoned him, so he quickly and suddenly assumes that Logan is one of the soldiers that are looking to put him back in that mutant prison in that mutant prison island.

Logan tries to tell him that he's not one of them, but Gambit attacks him by levitating poker cards in the air and making them hit Logan into the wall behind him which causes it to break the wall behind him outside.

He sees Sabretooth outside in the streets of New Orleans and sees John Wraith's dead body next to him. So why did John even try to kill Sabretooth? Did he really think that punching him to death was going to happen and work? Sabretooth has a rapid regenerative healing factor (he can rapidly heal from wounds easily), so what made John think that he could take on Sabretooth? Such a dumb film.

So back to me talking about Wolverine discovering Sabretooth outside. He confronts Sabrertooth outside in the streets at night. He ejects his metal claws out and Sabretooth's reaction was "ooo, shiny", which was a cheesy line.

So Wolverine fights Sabretooth and actually has the upper hand in the fight. Wolverine was about to kill Sabretooth during the fight and takes too long to decapitate him, so then Gambit illogically and stupidly runs from building rooftop to rooftop and jumps on the ground with his spear and smashes the ground with it which makes Wolverine and Sabretooth bounce high in the air.

First of all, what as the need for him to run from rooftop to rooftop to smash the ground like that, and second, why did he even interrupt the fight if Wolverine was interested in dealing with Sabretooth instead of him? So Sabertooth runs away while he as the chance, Wolverines runs to kill him, but then that idiot Gambit hits Wolverine with his spear.

Wolverine cuts Gambit's spear in half. Gambit runs away and uses his two broken halves of the spear to climb a building and get on a balcony to escape from Wolverine. Wolverine cuts the fire escape latter connected to the balcony (which was stupid) where Gambit was fleeing.

So Wolverine cuts the fire escape until the balcony falls down in the alleyway, which was incredibly stupid. So Gambit falls down onto the alleyway and Wolverin grabs him and tells him that he's not one of the soldiers trying to take Gambit back to prison and tells him to take him to the island where he can kill Sabretooth, Stryker, and everyone he hates.

So Gambit agrees to take him to the island. They both go in a helicopter and fly to the island. That's when the atrocious third act happens. So Gambit drops Logan off at Three Mile Island. When he drops him off there, he drops him off IN THE FUCKING WATER.

Why didn't he just drop Logan off at the ground? Why did he make him jump into the seawater? So later after he swims to the island, he walks on land and his clothes are completely already dry. How the hell did his clothes dry so fast? Then he enters inside the facility in the island, then he sees a couple of soldiers take Scott Summers to a prison cell.

What the hell was the point of bringing Cyclops into this movie? He should never have been in this movie. He had no purpose in the story. It's supposed to be a Wolverine movie, not an X-Men movie.

So Wolverine hides behind a wall from the soldiers. Why did he hide? Wolverine is clearly more than capable enough of killing them and saving the mutant prisoners. Then he walks into a lab and confronts Stryker.

He sees Stryker's scientists experimenting on Wade Wilson a.k.a. Weapon XI. He hears Logan's footsteps and just assumes it's Logan before even turning around to see if it's him. He says "Logan" before turning his head to see if it's him.

Kind of dumb. So he says "welcome back to the war" to him. He then turns his head to look at him. Logan asks Stryker to tell him why he did all of this before he kills him. Stryker revealed to him that he needed his powers for "the Pool".

He rephrases it by saying "the mutant killer, Dead Pool". Wait, what? THAT'S SUPPOSED TO BE DEADPOOL? An ugly, bald, mute man with his mouth sewn shut is supposed to be Deadpool a.k.a. "The Merc with a Mouth"? More like the merc without a mouth.

So Kayla suddenly appears in the background. Logan sees her an can't literally cannot believe it was Kayla at first. He probably thought it was decoy or a double at first. Stryker tells her that it's really her.

She reveals that she faked her death by letting Victor give her some drug that slows the rate of the heartbeat so much it appears that you flatline for a few minutes. It's dumb, it's a drug that that doesn't even really exist.

Then Stryker reveals to Logan that Kayla is a mutant who has the mutant ability to influence others by touching them while telling them what to do. Logan becomes heartbroken and puts his knuckle on the ground in grief.

... Who the hell puts their knuckle on the ground when they're heartbroken? Then he expresses his devastation and disappointment to her and leaves the facility....with all the poor innocent mutants still locked up.

Did he really forget that he was on a mission to save all of the mutants, kill all the soldiers, kill Sabretooth, and kill Stryker? So Sabretooth comes out of nowhere and demands Stryker to inject his skeleton with A.