Featured Movies
Partners
X-Men Origins: WolverineFor audiences, relationships with movie characters are like holiday romances: a few fleeting, fully realised moments together are enough. Nobody wants to see the baby photos or meet the parents.
Perhaps someone should have told George Lucas this before he showed Darth Vader as a teenaged Incredible Sulk. Or the makers of Hannibal Rising and Psycho IV: The Beginning before they replaced Anthonys Hopkins and Perkins with, respectively, a strange little Frenchman and that kid off E.T..
Although a judicious reboot worked for Bond and Batman, you get the sense the X-Men series is backtracking because all forward momentum has been exhausted. X-Men and X2, both directed by Bryan Singer, had steely cores of their own due to the array of personal demons on show, the haunting, holocaust-themed subtext and the presence of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, two of the greatest British actors alive. Though fun, Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand hit an immovable force not even Vinnie Jones's Juggernaut could bash through: the law of diminishing returns.
Written seemingly pass-the-parcel style by David Benioff (25th Hour and, er, Troy) and Skip Woods (Hitman and Swordfish) Wolverine is a on a par with its predecessor, even if the way exciting scenes clatter into clunky ones suggests the script doctor should be struck off.
Strip away the comic-book mythology and what's left is basically Commando, if Arnie had chosen to coat his skeleton with adamantium, rather than just painting himself black and speaking English badly. Someone's killing off the mutant militia of Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston, a fine predecessor to X2's Brian Cox), and former member Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), now a loved-up lumberjack living off-radar with teacher Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins), must find out who.
Along the way, he encounters X-Men old and new, including his feral brother, Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber, an even finer predecessor to X-Men's Tyler Mane), card-shark Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), mouthy swordsman Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), the teleporting Wraith (Black-Eyed Peas' Will i Am) and the self-explanatory Blob (Kevin Durand), plus dialogue that might once have been mangled by Arnie himself when he appeared as Commando's John Matrix.
"The worst part of it is I should have known better," growls Wolverine after Huston's Stryker's implausibly dastardly schemes are revealed to him. No, the worst parts are the well-worn action-movie aphorisms ("Welcome to the war!"; "Let's go to work!" etc), the colossal plot holes and Kevin Durand's even bigger, Fat Bastard-style flab suit.
Come the fight scenes, however, and it's a different story - one you might actually listen to. In an arresting credit sequence that should interest Zack Snyder's lawyers, Wolverine and Sabretooth rip through a century and a half of American military history like hirsute Highlanders. Sabretooth even starts a My Lai-style massacre in Vietnam - pretty bold for a studio blockbuster.
Though Schreiber glowers and growls with the best of them, and the (many) sibling smackdowns have a crunchy vitality, it's Jackman's charisma that smooths out the bumpier parts of the ride. Whether howling in pain - naked - as adamantium needles snap from his spine and bullets ping off his forehead, or just raising a disdainful eyebrow like a man terminally incapable of giving a damn, he was born to play this role and he knows it. Perhaps this is one holiday romance worth pursuing a little further.
|
