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While
reviewers nearly always criticize a movie when it’s too
formulaic, there are also instances in which a movie’s defiance
of the established formula is a bad thing. This is true for
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (henceforth referred to as
just Wolverine), which suffers from the lack of a
sustained female lead. Yes, the title protagonist has a lover,
but she serves as only an afterthought and obligatory
plot-device when compared to Iron Man’s Pepper Potts or
The Dark Knight’s Rachel Dawes. In fact, Wolverine’s
Kayla (Lynn Collins) is more like the imperiled love-interest
you’d see on a Saturday morning cartoon adaptation of a
superhero comic book. But as the genre has come into its own in
the world of cinema over the years, filmmakers have realized a
more vivid, romantic ideal for the woman. In its quest to be
all-testosterone, Wolverine loses a piece of soul in
trivializing its only prominent female character. Which begs the
question: isn’t the most testosterone-charged visual actually
that of an attractive vixen?
Apparently,
Wolverine screenwriters David Benioff and Skip Woods and
director Gavin Hood thought that 15-year-old boys’ ideal of
machismo was centered not in the lovely lady I desperately
wanted to appear, but in non-stop action that’s generally boring
for the rest of us. It’s clear that they that they made
Wolverine to be a cinematic product, not a piece of
art that transcends the comic-book genre (as the aforementioned
examples do). The movie was written with its target-audience—not
story or character-arcs—in mind, with the expressed interest of
making money. Indeed, many (if not most) studio pictures are
conceived this way, but rarely have the creators’ intentions
been so transparent. Wolverine may stay true to its
source, but when has a comic book ever provided a good template
for a film to directly copy over to celluloid? Not even the
deepest of works—think about how much Zack Snyder had to
condense Alan Moore’s Watchmen—can boast this. Whether
the plot of Benioff and Woods’ script was already in the comic
is irrelevant. When you’ve made a movie with little but repeated
action sequences, your commercial intention to appeal only to
those who drink blue slushees at the multiplex is offensively
transparent.
That all
sounds pretty harsh for a movie I ultimately didn’t hate. I’m
far more frustrated by the masses who tell the studios that
tired, straightforward pictures like Wolverine should be
made than I am by Wolverine itself. For whatever reason,
the film hit a lingering nerve in me, but so could have any one
of hundreds of others, so I must keep things in perspective. Its
uninspired inception notwithstanding, Wolverine is
handsomely constructed by director Gavin Hood, who displays
striking assuredness for his first mega-budget movie. The
action, rote and uselessly abundant as it is, looks good and can
be followed in ways that similar material in recent
schizophrenic, video-game-imitating productions like
Terminator Salvation cannot. On this note, Hood paces the
film well given the plot’s triteness. And then there’s Wolverine
himself, Hugh Jackman, who’s as charismatic as ever, truly the
epitome of a movie star. Then again, as one watches the actor in
Wolverine, one can’t help but feel scorn for the fact
that he didn’t choose a more original film to cash in on.
Swiftly
executed as the movie may be, however, there still is no way to
justify its existence. Fanboys of the comic might make the case
that the life-story of Wolverine, from his bravery fighting in
America’s wars to his transformation into more than just your
average mutant at the hands of the U.S. Army’s William Stryker
(Danny Huson), make for a compelling film. While I understand
this argument to an extent and was captivated by certain scenes
in Wolverine myself, I would respond: doesn’t the process
of explaining this character eliminate all the fascinating
mystery there was behind him in the previous X-Men films?
Nothing reeks of a financially-motivated sequel more than the
infamous prequel, and Wolverine is emblematic of this.
While not a bad exercise in popcorn-entertainment when viewed on
its own merits, Wolverine nonetheless discomfortingly
illustrates a larger problem with Hollywood.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 5.9.2009
Screened on:
5.25.2009 at the AMC Burbank 8 in
Burbank, CA.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is rated PG-13
and runs 107 minutes.
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