So The Wolverine is coming out this summer, so to prepare for that I started going through a bunch of X-men stuff. In fact i just finished going through the entire X-men cartoon from the 90's a couple of days ago. So now I'm going to start watching the movies. And since I already reviewed X-Men first class back when it came out (you can see it for yourself. It's one of the reviews from June of 2011) I'm going to start the reviews for the X-men movies with a particular movie that everyone seems to hate; X-men Origins: Wolverine.
Plot: In 1845, James Howlett discovers his mutant power of having bone claws coming from his hands when he kills the groundskeeper that kills his father. The groundskeeper turns out to be his father, and so James runs away with the groundskeeper's son Victor. The apparent brothers spend the next century fighting all the wars from around that time and eventually joins a black ops team for mutants. James leaves the group due to their disregard for human life, and leaves, but when Victor comes back years later and kills his girlfriend, he swears revenge.
This film is can be roughly summed up in two words: clumsy and redundant. Among the X-men/X-men related films, this particular movie is often known to the the worst with people acting like it doesn't exist and automatically considered as non-canon to the X-men film franchise. The soul reason to that is the story. This film is made to be basically give us Wolverine's past with how he came to be. Now granted some people may find that interesting, but the problem is that we already know about it. X-Men 2 already gave us his past, so there was no real reason to make a movie out of it. In fact some critics like Roger Ebert and Scott Mendelson asks why we should even care about the guy and state that this film makes Wolverine less interesting since we already know everything about him. Ultimately, the film may as well be considered as an excuse to get more big action scenes of Wolverine and throw in a bunch of other heroes and villains from the Marvel comics. Now all this is great with the action scenes because they may not be particularly memorable, but they are pretty awesome to watch. With throwing a bunch of heroes and villains into the film on the other hand, it's pretty stupid. A lot of them are there for no real reason other then to just be there and sometimes even the more used characters turn out to be very stupid or kind of rape the actual characters they're based off of. One example that stands out for me personally is The Blob and how they over do what he is. I know the idea of the character is that he's really fat while also being indestructible, but they over did the fat part in a way that makes him look just disgusting. The Blob is a big round guy in the comics - there can me doubt about that. But he's also a little imitating in the comics to the point where he's even a crazy cannibal in the Ultimate Marvel comics. So that's just stupid that they tried to make him appear more funny in a rather disgusting ay then more what he's like in the comics. The second example is probably the most hated and talked about with this movie: Deadpool. Deadpool is one of the greatest mercenary/anti-heroes in the Marvel comics or comics in general. Along with having an interesting story and being a bad-a, he's also famous for being very funny with how he's always talking and tends to break the fourth wall in his comics. But in this film, Deadpool is rarely seen and doesn't really talk. He starts being talkative a little bit in the beginning, but during the end of the film, he is unable to talk at all. Despite some of the action and his abilities, that has come to piss a lot of fans off to no end. All I truly hear from people when it comes to talking about ANYTHING that has to do with this movie is "They ruined Deadpool" this and "It's fricking retarded that they didn't allow Deadpool to talk" that, and complaints about Ryan Reynolds just because he's the guy who played the character and things just easily got worse for him when he did Green Lantern a couple years later. I wouldn't exactly blame Reynolds considering how little they gave him to do in the first place, (though you'll get no argument from me about Green Lantern whether it has to do with Reynolds or not), but regardless I side with all the fans that said those things. Granted, I'm not exactly a devout reader of the Deadpool comics or anything like that, but I know the guy well enough that I know the standard as to how he should be in film or TV, and what they did in this film doesn't come close. Now I won't say every character was used stupidly, Wolverine was awesome, Gambit turned out to be in this movie and I think they did his character pretty well, and it was pretty awesome to see Professor X during the end. But on a whole, this was not a great film when it comes to giving us new characters to get to know form the Marvel universe X-men or otherwise. Lastly, I will say coming back to the plot that while some points were interesting, but a lot of what happens - like what they do with the relationship between Wolverine and Sabertooth - gives us a lot of holes about how all that connects to the X-Men trilogy. Ultimately, this is why people prefer X-Men First Class over this movie as an actual canon prequel to the trilogy. Because while there are some issues with that film too, it stays true to its propose as a prequel and even truer in some ways with their characters like Emma Frost and The Beast.
And that's my review for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It has its fun action scenes and does a decent job with a small amount of characters like Gambit. But otherwise it's a clumsy movie that does a extremely poor job with most of the characters and gives us a story that everyone already knows with some extra "information" on the side that just gives it a whole bunch of holes making the film redundant as a movie and as something that is suppose to have any part in the X-Men films. So you may enjoy it anyway with the action and stuff, but it really is an unmemorable movie that's not really worth watching.
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