X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a comic book film that seems to have been made for the pure sake of it. Little about it feels overly worthwhile, most of the action set pieces are short-lived and disappointing, and the performances are patchy to say the least (although I doubt that's where the quality emphasise was aimed at). It's relieving to see that it isn't the disaster that early speculation would have you believe, as there are some fun and well-done sequences, but for the most part it really feels like a wasted opportunity.
As the title suggests, Wolverine goes into the past of the healing, adamantium-clawed hero and explains some of the mysteries that were alluded to in the first three X-Men movies. Logan (or Wolverine as we've known him as so far) and his brother Victor (who later becomes Sabretooth - played by Liev Schreiber, a film highlight) fight in many wars together until eventually being convinced to join a special team of mutants that are being put together by William Stryker (Danny Huston). But after a disagreement Logan quits and seeks a quiet life with his new wife.
But Victor seems to have a problem, and years later starts hunting down each member of the team he and Logan joined for Stryker. However it's only after Victor kills Logan's wife that he becomes interested in his dealing with his past life, and he joins Stryker's Mutant X program that leads him to getting his adamantium skeleton. But soon realising Stryker has double-crossed him he wants to seek revenge for the death of his wife and for what Stryker has turned him into.
For anyone who may not be overly familiar with the ins and outs of the titular character's past, I don't know if Wolverine serves as a good history lesson within the context of this long-running fantastical set of stories brought to life. I only know the character from the movies, so I have no idea if what is presented here, such as the fact that Wolverine actually had bone claws from childhood or that Cyclops wasn't simply first "noticed" when we first saw him in the first X-Men movie, are true to what happens in the comics or not. I do know that some of the stuff, even within the context of such a type of film, are kind of groan-inducing. For some wildly strange reason all of this stuff was acceptable in particularly the first and second movies, but it seems to be done a lot cheesier this time around.
That may be down to the fact that they've brought in a director inexperienced with this type of superhero movie, in the form of Gavin Hood, the man behind the Oscar-winning 2005 film Tsotsi and the 2007 political thriller Rendition. Maybe the sudden jump from dead-serious fare to something as silly as this just didn't gel right, and it results in an awkward and clunky action film. Then again this may have been a project doomed to "okay at best" territory from the very beginning. The first two movies were under the expert direction of one Bryan Singer, who's departure from the franchise after the second left us with the enjoyable mess that was X-Men: The Last Stand. Even if it weren't entirely Hood's fault, they still could have picked someone far more experienced and therefore suited to this type of thing to be the man behind the camera.
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