SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER REVIEW PARTY!!!!!!!!
YAY!
I decided that in my endless amounts of boredom and in waiting for my damned Justice League episodes to download, fucking torrents, that I had nothing better to do than to show up and fill the internet with more of my bullshit writing. It's full of everyone else's bullshit writing, why can't I do it too? I guess I already have, I just don't do it very often. I think I might just create a Twitter for these reviews. Surely I could type 144 characters for a review right? Right?!
Meh.
Today we're gonna start with the first of the big summer movies that have hit this year, and appropriately, the first of them I saw. That's right, I'm talking about:
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
I know what you're thinking though. "But Joey. That movie came out in May, how can it be a summer blockbuster?" Well, let me answer that. It just is. It's not my fault all of the studios felt the need to release their big movies before summer actually got here. Maybe they're just all scared of Transformers pounding their box office numbers in the ass. Robot rape, with explosions. Michael Bay, FTW.
Now before I start this review I would like to point out some very important information. I, before anything else, am a comic book fan. There's nothing I like more than sitting down with a nicely prepared book of colorful art and well written prose. My entire childhood rests on the backs of characters and worlds created in comic books. My mind may as well exist in a land of comic book art, because I associate my entire life with the collective works of the comic book medium. Even Mark Millar.... MARK MILLAR! Ahem. Yes. Moving on.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the first film in the Origins group of films and the fourth film in the X-Men franchise. The story follows comic book god character James "Wolverine" Howlett all throughout his life. Based loosely on the Origin comic book, which chronicled the life of Wolverine in great detail, X-Men Origins hit with quite a bit of hype surrounding it. Hugh Jackman is the only returning actor from the series, reprising his role as the X-Men's resident bad ass. Jackman also took up the mantle as a producer for the movie and I'm sure he had a hand in some of the other casting.
Before we talk about the movie some more, I want to say something about Gavin Hood. Fuck him. Hood came onto the Hollywood scene some time ago, but didn't really make a big mainstream splash until he put out Rendition, which starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon. I never saw that movie, but I did hear some very good things about it. So when I heard that Hood was going to direct Wolverine, I was kind of excited. Then he does the very thing that pisses me off about comic book Hollywood. Hood comes out and says that he was never a fan of the books and that he never read them. He also said that he learned to love the character after reading up on him, but to me, that is not acceptable. A director hired who knows nothing about the source material, just irritates me. There are plenty of directors out there who know the X-Men franchise and every one of them would understand him better than Hood. Instead, we get a generic summer action film with some cool effects and the director trying to stuff some political undertones into it. SHIT.
The biggest appeal of Wolverine to me, and to many comic book fans, was surely the inclusion of a handful of lesser known comic book characters. I was ecstatic when I heard that the entire Weapon X program and some of the members were going to finally be in a movie. I love the Weapon X storyline, especially because it delivered me my favorite comic book character of all time. Deadpool. If you look at the movie's cast, you have Deadpool. Sabretooth, Maverick, Bolt, The Blob, Silverfox, Gambit, and even Emma Frost. Talk about fan service. Tons of beloved characters involved here. Even the casting of the roles was pretty much spot on, for the most part. Kevin Durang played an awesome Blob, Taylor Kitsch delivered as Gambit, Liev Schreiber was a good Sabretooth even without the right look, Ryan Reynolds was crafted by God to play Deadpool, and even will.i.am was a decent Kestrel. How can they fuck this up?!
The biggest flaw in this movie is the writing. That is undeniable. I don't blame Hugh Jackman, I don't blame Gavin Hood, I just blame the writers. I don't know who David Benioff and Skip Woods are, but they're now officially assholes. A little bit of research reveals that Benioff is actually a semi-well respected writer. He writes novels, including the 25th Hour, which was well adapted by Spike Lee into a good movie starring Edward Norton. However, when one looks at Skip Woods' filmography, you see the problem. Skip Woods' is the writer on such masterpieces as Swordfish, Htman, and the upcomic GI Joe and A-Team movies. A real genius. I now officially blame Skip Woods for ruining my life. FUCK SKIP WOODS.
How does any one person fuck up such a large amout of characters? I'm not sure that's even possible. I'm not sure he got even one character in that entire fucking movie correct outside of Wolverine and Sabretooth, who are still variations of themselves. Bolt on Team-X? An Asian merciless Maverick? Emma Frost as a flat-chested teenager with only diamond skin? Cyclops being hunted by Weapon X? A MOUTHLESS DEADPOOL? Gambit running up the fucking wall with a broken bo staff? I hate my life.
The entire time that was watching Wolverine, I felt like I was being raped. If you can imagine this film as a large man, picture him straddling my face against my will. That's what it was like. The writing was terrible, the characters were all ruined, and the storyline itself was laughable. I don't really know who to blame for this monstrosity, but we'll just settle on Fox. They hired everyone, so fuck them. Everything that happens in Wolverine is just an excuse for Hugh Jackman to yell, kill people, and dominate. If they're not setting up scenes for Jackman, they're setting up the inclusion of another character they don't understand.
In all, Wolverine is a mess of a comic book film. Most of the characters are two-dimensional or flat, outside of maybe Wolverine. Sabretooth is violent for no real reason and everyone else acts without a single though running through their mind. The highlights of the movie are the first five minutes you see each character, because after their five minutes they all go down hill. The only good things to come out of this movie are some cool fight seens, some stuff to make fun of, and some spin-offs for Taylor Kitsch and Ryan Reynolds. I will say however, to be fair, if you're not invested into these wonderful characters, you may like Wolverine. Without my knowledge of these characters, Wolverine could be just a big dumb action movie, and there's nothing wrong with that. Explosions, death, swords, and mutants. Sounds cool to me.
Grade: D
