X-Men - The Legend Of Wolverine (DVD)

...I’ve never really gotten into X-Men properly, because I have always found them to be really lazy about how they got their powers. With Spider-Man, he was bitten by a special spider, and with The Incredible Hulk he was exposed to gamma radiation that unlocked his bestial powers and turned him green. With X-Men, it’s because they were born with it. Sort of reminds me about how bad those Maybelline adverts were with their “Maybe she’s born with it” ...
.../> So when I heard X-Men Origins : Wolverine was coming out to cinemas with an attempt to explain the back story for Wolverine, I was like ‘Hell yeah!’ I felt as if I was going to jump through the ceiling, shit would go flying out of my ass and I would rocket out through the roof. I had seen the 3 previous X-Men movies so it was interesting to see how this one would tie into Xmen-1. But when I went to see it on the big screen, it was just an action ... more

*Friendly warning here as this review has many spoilers, so if you don't mind knowing a few things beforehand, please feel free to read! This is not the DVD review as this movie has only been released in cinemas this Friday 1st May. This is a film review after watching it at cinemas.*

I’ve never really gotten into X-Men properly, because I have always found them to be really lazy about how they got their powers. With Spider-Man, he was bitten by a special spider, and with The Incredible Hulk he was exposed to gamma radiation that unlocked his bestial powers and turned him green. With X-Men, it’s because they were born with it. Sort of reminds me about how bad those Maybelline adverts were with their “Maybe she’s born with it” slogan. Another thing that struck me as weird is why these super powered human beings, called mutants, are so hated in the Marvel world. There is a lot of racism against the mutants because of their powers, yet Spider-Man swings along with his spider powers and it is like ‘Go Spidey, go!” And then when a mutant swings by: ‘Look it’s a mutant. Fuck him!’ What is that about? It makes no sense to me really.

So when I heard X-Men Origins : Wolverine was coming out to cinemas with an attempt to explain the back story for Wolverine, I was like ‘Hell yeah!’ I felt as if I was going to jump through the ceiling, shit would go flying out of my ass and I would rocket out through the roof. I had seen the 3 previous X-Men movies so it was interesting to see how this one would tie into Xmen-1. But when I went to see it on the big screen, it was just an action movie with a lot of action and little else. Tons of kung fu fighting and special effects that impressed, but the plot, story and character development was a real let down.

The movie starts out with our main character, Logan (AKA Wolverine, adult played by Hugh Jackman) as a child and extremely ill in bed, with his half brother Victor (AKA Sabretooth, adult played by Liev Schreiber) watching over him. At this point in movie, you’ll get to see the first time that Wolverine goes berserk and uses his claws, which are still bone. He then runs away with his brother and we get a slow-mo collage of what the siblings have been doing over the years, such as fighting in the American Civil war, World War II and the Vietnam War. In fact, it is the Vietnam War and what happened there that shapes the path leading up to the rest of the movie. Let’s just say something bad was going to happen, and the brothers get executed, except that they don’t die. Healing powers, it would come so in handy when the flu decides to mutate again.

The brothers, while locked up in a box, are approached by Colonel William Stryker, with the offer to join him and his team of similarly super powered beings. He offers them ‘special privileges’, and so without much deliberation, they join his team, dubbed Team X. Wolverine slowly starts to hate his way of living by killing other people, so after a recent mission to receive an ominous looking metal rock and the interrogation of an entire village that ends in death, he decides to leave. 6 years later, he ends up with a school teacher called Kayla Silverfox (played by actress Lynn Collins) as they live together in the Canadian Rockies. You can tell immediately that she is more than she seems. Wolverine, at his job as a lumberjack, is visited by Stryker and is told that somebody out there is killing off the former members of the team that he left 6 years old. Showing a lack of concern over the news, he just walks off and gets on with his life, until his girlfriend ends up dead. Cue the cheesy raging roar, the agreement with Stryker to fuse a metal compound called Adamantium (from the mission 6 years ago to retrieve that ominous looking metal rock) onto his bones to help in his revenge, subsequently becoming Weapon X, and finding out he was being used, resulting in all hell breaking loose. The movie then properly takes off from there, with so many twists and turns that it just makes you wonder what the heck is going on.

The soundtrack isn’t that great if I am honest. Nothing stood out for me and most of the time I was listening for the sound effects and watching the special effects. I remember watching Troy with Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom. That movie was epically bad, but it had this epic soundtrack as they approached the shores to Troy and start fighting the Trojans. The music there was awesome and really set the mood, but that was not present with this movie. It’s not that bad though, because if it had a bad soundtrack, I wouldn’t have noticed due to everything else happening on screen.

The first thing I noticed was the plot holes, because there were a few. For example, this is supposed to take place around 20 years before the first X-Men movie, but we see Cyclops, the kid who can fire laser beams out of his eyes, as about 17 years old in this movie. This means that in X-Men 1 he is about 37 going on 40, and that just seemed implausible to me. Does he even look that old in the other movies? No, he looks about mid-twenties at most. One that comes to mind as I think about it is in X-Men 2, Stryker (played by Brian Cox) had a deep southern accent, and yet in this movie Stryker (played by Danny Huston) has lost that accent. Another example is how Sabretooth in this movie seems more interested in Wolverine since they are half brothers with a lot of pent up anger and rage to unleash. But in X-Men 1, Sabretooth is more or less mute and does not give a crap about Wolverine. I just thought about that and wondered what exactly happened there. Did Sabretooth get mind-wiped or something? This movie offered no explanation whatsoever. One more example is the lame attempt to make sure that Wolverine has lost his memory in the lead up to the X-Men 1 movie, because that would become another plot hole to solve with a sequel to the prequel that none of the executives wanted. Since Wolverine has a virtually indestructible Adamantium skeleton, the bad guys deduced that the only way to kill him was with Adamantium bullets. But then near the end of the movie, one of the scientists says, ‘He won’t die from that’, and Stryker replies, ‘His brain will heal, but not his memories.’ I have to say, that’s just really cheap because it was so last minute. Didn’t they sit down to discuss a few of these things before planning out how to approach them?

Some characters in this movie seem shoehorned in simply because fanboys wanted those characters to be on the big screen. For instance, Remy LeBeau (aka Gambit, played by Taylor Kitsch) was added as an escapee from a secret mutant experiment facility on Three Mile Island, throwing his explosive playing cards around and swinging his fighting staff. Gambit is one of my favourite characters in X-Men during my time trying to get into the series, and they just messed him up here. The actor didn’t even get Gambit’s Louisiana Cajun accent correct, nor did he showcase any of Gambit’s smooth talking lady seduction moves. The character played hardly any part in the movie, so they could have easily have left him out. There is a scene in the movie where Wolverine visits Gambit to find out the location of Three Mile Island, only to get blasted through the wall. After Wolverine gets up from the blast, he sees his half-brother, Sabretooth, standing there above a dead John Wraith (played by Will.i.Am, more about him later) and begins to attack. The fight nearly ends with Wolverine winning and finishing off Sabretooth, but that asshole Gambit leaps in with his fighting staff and BOOM! The alleyway is engulfed by a shockwave splitting up the half-brothers. Sabretooth escapes and Wolverine has to fight Gambit. This part really annoyed me because Sabretooth was the guy dragging mutants off to Three Mile Island, so why was Gambit not helping Wolverine fight Sabretooth? It makes no sense.

Will.i.Am’s character is also completely pointless because he is just there to make the movie longer. He travels with Wolverine to find Gambit because, as far as I could tell, he had nothing better to do. Just before he dies fighting Sabretooth, leading to Wolverine busting through the wall as already mentioned, he was trying to beat up Sabretooth by teleporting around and punching Sabretooth in the face a few times. You know those primary school children who pretend to act cool and jump around in a boxing training stance looking like they can fight, while throwing out stupid taunts like ‘You’re ugly’ or ‘Your mother’s so fat, that when she jumped for joy, she got stuck’? Not only is it annoying, but Will.i.Am does it the entire time he is fighting Sabretooth, all 15 seconds of it. When Sabretooth finally killed him, I cheered.

Another one that annoyed me was that the use of Weapon IX, Deadpool (played by Ryan Reynolds), as the final big bad boss guy to beat. The entire movie was centred on Sabretooth being an evil bad ass, being evil for no reason other than just to be evil. He pretty much played Wolverine’s main source of physical grief throughout the movie, with Stryker being the intellectual back-of-the-scenes evil schemist. But then right at the end of the movie, he has to fight this other guy called Deadpool. Do you remember that movie Blade with Wesley Snipes and Stephen Dorff? Do you remember why you loved the last fight between the two? It was because you watched the entire journey of Stephen Dorff’s evil character slowly scheming his way to the top to gain the ultimate power before fighting Wesley Snipes’ character. You understand the characters and know why they are fighting, even if you disagree with their opinions and raison d'etre. With this movie, you build that with Sabretooth and Wolverine, and then they mess up the flow by bringing in Deadpool. They didn’t even get Deadpool right, Deadpool is an ugly, insane lunatic who usually wears a mask. This Deadpool is some pretty boy with swords coming out of his arms. They just messed this up big time.

There is a part in this movie where Wolverine runs into a barn of this farm where a kind elderly couple, Travis and Heather Hudson (played by Max Cullen and Julia Blake respectively) reside, and he is spotted by them as they are driving home in their pick-up truck. They offer him shelter and food as well as some clothes to wear as well. The first time I saw it I thought it was Smallville, and that they were Ma and Pa Kent. I was half expecting them to tell Wolverine ‘Yeah, and the other day we picked up this alien baby from a giant crater, and he has superpowers and stuff.’ Just when you are just getting to know them and before you could warm to the couple, they get killed off. I thought it was too abrupt and it just ruined any emotional attachment the audience could have had with them as they were helping our hero.

The special effects are amazing and the fight scenes are cool, such as the Gambit fighting staff shockwave ground blast and the Wolverine claws cutting through everything after they become Adamantiumised. But some effects made me laugh because they were so bad. Sabretooth has this faster running move where he gets on all fours and starts pouncing like a cat to get somewhere quickly. The effect for it looks as if he was being moved along on a zip line and any surface he bounded from looks as if he hardly touched it at all. It just made me laugh at how silly it looked. Then there is the scene at the farm where Wolverine is checking out his new Adamantiumised claws in front of the bathroom mirror. They just looked so fake that they made me giggle at them. I have seen plastic claw gloves look more realistic than that, I can tell you. Finally, at the end of the movie, Charles Xavier (played by Patrick Stewart) appears on screen for about 20 seconds. I have to say, it looked as if they had Photoshopped Patrick’s face to make it 20 years younger (digital anti-wrinkle cream is much more effective than real cream) and then slap it onto a bald man’s head with an orange glow around it. I know he is bald, but that orange glow was not necessary. It was just amazingly bad how it looked, as if he was a wax action figure.

There were some honestly funny parts of this movie, and almost all, if not all, of them came from Wolverine himself. There is a scene where he goes to Las Vegas to speak to some ex-team mates and one of them, the Blob (played by Kevin Durand) has put on a lot of weight. He has a sparring session with him and quips about how ‘He looks like he’s got an ass for a stomach’ or something along those lines. It just cracks me up some of the things that are said in this movie, and are definitely something for you to look out for as you watch it. Another thing you should look out for are Wolverine’s poses. Man, Hugh Jackman must have gotten really drunk to pull those poses off because some of them look ridiculously bad. You know when Spider-Man pulls off one of those awkward and painful looking poses in the front of the comics? Wolverine does that a lot in the movie, like near the end when he is going to fight Sabretooth on Three Mile Island. He shouts, ‘VICTOR!’, and then does a seagull arm arched to the side pose and lets out an angry roar. That was really funny, although it was not meant intentionally. Look out for more of that when you watch this.

Overall, it is a good action movie if you are looking into something with a lot of special effects and intense fighting. It isn’t something you would watch for the story or the character development, but something for when you want to switch your mind off so that you don’t have to analyze it and just want to enjoy some high-octane action of head smashing, face bashing, lazer cutting, all out super powered mayhem. This is better than the other X-Men movies by far, but it doesn’t make this an outstanding movie. The 12A certification meant that there was going to be toned down for the younger viewers, so they made Wolverine a hero, a good guy that would not kill innocent people for no reason and would not make the finishing move, rather than the anti-hero he has always been well known for. That dumbing-down of the main character made him appeal less to me because I know him as that lone wanderer with an inner rage and performs the odd bout of violence now and again. At most, this is a 6 out of 10 movie, but if you switch off any reason or logic and watch it purely for the action, 6 out of 10 is plenty enough. 

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