X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (Gavin Hood). 107 minutes. Opens Friday (May 1). For venues and times, see movies. Rating: NN
If nothing else, X-Men Origins: Wolverine delivers on the promise of its title, laying out the formative events in the life of everyone’s favourite adamantium-enhanced mutant.
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But viewed in the larger context of the X-Men franchise, it’s a long way from the heights of Bryan Singer’s first two films this one’s more of a piece with the Brett Ratner-directed entry, The Last Stand.
Like Ratner’s soulless threequel, Wolverine moves along for a while on the strength of Hugh Jackman’s performance, counting on raw fanboy goodwill. We want this new chapter to be worthy of the what’s come before. And in the title sequence, which places the nigh-indestructible berserker warrior in every major Western conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam, there’s a sense of the cheerful, ridiculous potential in giving Logan his own movie. (He’s like the Highlander, except he doesn’t even need a sword.)
But the fun goes out of the action almost immediately afterward, once Logan and his even more bloodthirsty brother, Victor (Liev Schreiber, terribly miscast), find themselves recruited into a mutant super-squad by the calculating William Stryker (Danny Huston). From there, David Benioff and Skip Woods’s screenplay is a by-the-numbers march through the comic-book basics, which ultimately lead to a traumatized Logan signing on to the Weapon X program, the results of which were shown in flashbacks in the earlier films.
Director Gavin Hood – who made the crowd-pleasing, Oscar-winning Tsotsi and the risible political thriller Rendition – gives every scene the same flat, tense staging. There’s no sense of momentum or rhythm. Action scenes start and stop to no real effect, and beloved characters like Gambit and Deadpool are shoehorned into the story without much thought about their use. (Say what you will about Wolverine’s relative ineffectiveness in the first X-Men movie – at least the guy mattered to the story.)
Jackman maintains his effortless cool throughout, and even manages to wring a little emotion out of a rote sub plot involving Logan’s doomed love for Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins).
But he’s coasting, and so is the movie.
