X-Men Origins: Wolverine or "How Not to Spend $10 at the Movies"

When trying to sum up my thoughts about this movie, it's hard to find a place to start. With so many misses, so many moments of utter embarrassment on screen, picking just one to start with would be unfair to the other, equally terrible parts that made up this hodge-podge of fail.

So okay, let's be positive here. What is there to like about "X-Men Origins: Wolverine?" The actors usually worked with what they had, even if it was terrible. Hugh Jackman makes a spot on Logan once again, with Liev Schreiver proving to be a perfect foil as Sabretooth. And believe it or not there are some genuinely entertaining moments lost within the shuffle. Every once in awhile the movie would play with an idea or two that seemed to be in the right direction. A scene where the newly adamnantium-laced Logan is taken in by an older couple is genuine and lighthearted and certainly out of place in this breakneck action movie. And I guess the director felt the same way because the ending of this touching moment is the exploding Wolverine helicopter fight that you may have seen once or twice on TV the past few weeks. Like any good scene in this movie, its quickly marred by just how much... how much everything sucks.

You can tell that they tried, or that somewhere down the line, someone tried to try to make this not a terrible movie. But trying and doing are two different things. You don't congratulate a potty training toddler when he takes a crap just next to the toilet, no matter how much he intended to make it to the bowl. In a way, that is the perfect metaphor for this movie. The horror of walking into a bathroom where someone took a crap on the floor is next to walking into a movie theater and finding out that they made this. The psychology is the same, you know what is supposed to happen but somewhere between thought and execution, something goes awry.

It's as if some big wig Fox executives got together and said "Okay, let's take everything that people hated about X-Men: The Last Stand and do it all over again. Only this time, let's make it twice as bad!" The plot is shoved aside quickly to bring out the cameos, which wouldn't have been a huge issue if any of the cameos were worth their salt.

Ryan Reynolds plays a perfect Deadpool for a pulse-pounding three minutes of film time or so and just when you sit back in your seat and say "Okay, good... this movie will be okay," he disappears only to be seen again as a mouthless, soulless, unneccesarily changed character. It's ridiculous how underused he is, especially with Fox announcing that they're doing a Deadpool movie. It looks like Ryan Reynolds dropped by the set and did his entire role in a day or two. He probably got paid more than I make in an entire year too.

Other cameo characters are changed in not only inexplicable, but downright confusing ways. Instead of simply making Blob a big fat mutant whose powers are that he's big and fat, they instead decided to make him just a normal super strength guy who gets fat over the course of the film through overeating or whatever. Except when people gain weight in real life, they don't get so fat that they can deflect punches with their gut-- they usually have heart attacks and die. Look, the reason Stan Lee came up with the X-Men and the concept of a mutant was to make origin stories easier. Having Blob fat because he's a mutant suspends the disbelief better than pretty much ripping on the morbidly obese.

Missteps like these happen pretty much every time the film decides to bring in a new idea. The movie starts with a young James Howlett growing his bone claws, but instead of launching into the story from the Origin miniseries, they thow an "OMG we're brothers" at the audience and decide to sum up Wolverine's life with Sabretooth in a Watchmen-did-it-better-montage and get right to the parts that matter, the cameos. Emma Frost is introduced at the end as a prisoner of Stryker. That could have been the easiest explanation except they go a step further by making her the sister of Kayla Silverfox. This is despite the fact Emma Frost is not a Native American, nor looks like Kayla or even has the same last name.

It's not that they messed with comic's canon, I can take that, it's just that the movie is never as good as you want it to be. Every time there's a good moment, it's instantly snatched away or ruined by an unintentinally funny scene. Every cliche is used, every line is hacknyed and characters meander from point A to point B with zero motivation, often walking away from conflicts for no reason so that they can get to the next point in the script.

Speaking of walking, when Kayla gives Stryker the psychic command to "Keep walking and walking and so on," did she fail to realize that they were on an island that was specifically three-miles long? He ain't getting far sweetheart.

I could go on, I could dissect every terrible moment in this movie, but instead I'll just issue a warning. In these harsh economic times you can't just go around throwing your money willy-nilly at every crappy superhero movie that comes along. Supporting this trash means you're giving them reasons to make more trash. You all saw X-Men: The Last Stand and we got this. If enough people take a stand and keep their precious money, then maybe the rights will revert back to Marvel and we'll see what a real X-Men movie looks like.

In conclusion, don't see it, I wish I hadn't. I wish someone had told me to stay away.

You're lucky you have me.