Monday, May 4, 2009

Review of X-Men: Wolverine


I wanted to wait a while and let everything sink in before diving into a little review of the new X-Men movie Wolverine. To start off, I should say that this was my least favorite of the X-men series, but I still enjoyed it. It will be very difficult for any X-Men movie to ever top X2, and I knew that going into Wolverine. I should also mention that Wolverine has never been one of my favorite characters in the comics/cartoon. I think Hugh Jackman does a great job with him, but I just don't really care for the character himself.

When I first saw the preview, I was excited to finally see Gambit in the movies! Gambit has always been my favorite X-men character and it's good to see him get some screen time, after he was written out of X2. It's difficult to say they did him justice because he was only in the movie for maybe 5 minutes of running time, but those 5 minutes were fantastic. I could have used a little more cajun accent out of him, but I'll have to let it slide, because he did at one point use the poker cards as a weapon and I may have yelled "squeeee!" in the theatre at that point. (P.S. You can see poker superstar Daniel Negreanu playing poker with Gambit in one scene)

If you watched the trailer and thought to yourself, "Oh Snap! I finally get to see ______" (Insert any character you saw in the preview besides Wolverine and Sabertooth here), then you'll be mildly disappointed. Most characters don't show up on screen for long, but I guess this is a Wolverine movie, not an X-men movie. Bolt, Blob, Deadpool, Emma Frost, etc etc - None are on screen for a significant amount of time. One cool thing is that there is a lot of talk circulating a Deadpool movie starring Ryan Reynolds. He was great in Wolverine and I really wish we could have seen him more.

The two characters I really could have used less of was John Wraith played by Will.I.Am and Stryker. Wow, I never expected Will.I.Am to be such an awful actor. I couldn't wait for him to get killed or fall down a hole or decide to move to the wilderness of Canada to be alone with himself and spare us all. Danny Huston had one of the most difficult jobs in this movie, playing up to Brian Cox's role in the 2003 movie X2. Brian Cox was incredible and Danny Huston just didn't have that same appeal. Since we're comparing anyways, there is a certain magic that Brian Singer brought to the first 2 X-Men movies, whereas somewhat new director Gavin Hood just didn't have the touch.

As far as the plot, as a whole, this just seemed like a bunch of action sequences thrown together with a shot or two of Hugh Jackman naked thrown in for the female audience. They make a small attempt at a story of love and loss with Wolverine, but it is pretty weak compared to the tragedy of Jean Gray and Cyclops in the previous movies. However, I guess its not fair to compare this movies to its predecessors. For an action movie, it did a great job of keeping me entertained. I never once thought, when is this movie going to be over and with the ADD I've been cultivating with YouTube videos lately, that's really saying something. I'm glad I got to see this one in theatres. May is going to be a really good month for Hollywood with Wolverine, Angels & Demons, Star Trek, and Terminator Salvation. I'd put my money on Star Trek to be the movie of the summer.

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