Review: 'Wolverine' [D+]

By Chase Kahn

I watched Gavin Hood's X-Men Origins: Wolverine on Blu-ray yesterday and was turned off immediately by the simplistic, fundamentally hackneyed storytelling and the CG-airbrushed sheen to it all, including the phony, video game-level cockiness towards the many action scenes. In short, I felt it was like an extension to X-Men III: The Last Stand and that this whole X-Men saga on screen peaked with Nightcrawler's attempted assassination at the beginning of X2 and is now in an irreversible free fall.

It's such a slog of a origin story -- beginning horribly with a tragic childhood event and detouring through moralistic behavior, hiding from greedy military figures, living in the country seeking solidarity, a love interest, revenge, a retired and hospitable old farmhouse couple, etc.

I know comic book adaptations tend to mirror one another, especially origin stories, but for instance, in Batman Begins (a film I love), the approach to the origin or birth/uprising of the titular superhero is handled with skill and infused with a refreshing pulse. Wolverine is so derivative and scatter-shot and busy budget-flexing to work out for anyone over the age of fifteen. I felt like I was immersed in a film made by GameStop employees who were pressured by the studio to cut fifteen minutes.