X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE [2009] review

I could say this about any action movie of recent times save for the Bourne series, X-MEN ORIGINS:  WOLVERINE has way too much CGI and not enough grit.  No doubt Hugh Jackman is the perfect actor to portray Wolverine on screen.  And the addition of Liev Schreiber as Victor Creed, aka, Sabretooth, pretty much carried the movie.  I’ve always liked Liev, and in the bad guy role here, he brings all necessary menace.  Yet neither of these two main characters ever appeared to be in believable jeopardy, for the most part.  

Now I’ve gone on record saying I love origin stories.  So I was stoked for Wolverine’s as I like the character as much as the next kid growing up watching the X-Men cartoon.  I mean, he’s a badass that calls people bub.  And I did find Wolverine’s very early history interesting, though no explanation is given for the main tragedy that starts the badass drive in Wolverine.  Also, Wolverine is a lot older than you thought he was, a lot older.  

The story is basically just about Wolverine trying to live normally, then seeking revenge, but oh yeah it started out with seeking vengeance of a sort.  So the remaining plot is pretty thin and there is side talk of mutants being rounded up by mutants.  

The introduction of Gambit was not that cool at all.  His voice is all wrong.  His Cajun accent should be MUCH stronger.  He didn’t really have any real place or purpose in the movie other than giving Wolverine a location he needed.  

There were some good visceral fighting scenes, but we all know Wolverine self-heals, as does Victor, so what’s the point really?  The final fight was over the top as one might expect with a new apex enemy appearing out of nowhere, thus we don’t care about the fight because we just see Wolverine battling some out of the wood work contrived opponent.  There was nothing at stake in the fight.  

It was cool to see young Wolverine and learn how he came to get the claws we’ve long seen.  Yet if you remove the word Wolverine from the title you are left with little more than another movie with a convenient story on which to build action and CGI sequences.  Things were just too random and not developed enough.  A few plot twists at the end helped keep the movie from being totally mindless. 

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