No franchise can sustain itself for more than a few movies without reinventing itself (James Bond, Star Wars). There is a reason for this: it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain that which made something fresh and exciting over multiple films. I can think of no 4th entry in a franchise that was just as good as the originals. So it is little surprise that X-Men Origins: Wolverine does not live up to the potential of the X-Men franchise. No, the surprise comes from just how slogged down and dull this excursion is. How do you take the most interesting character in your franchise and make him boring and even pathetic?The first and most obvious problem is that this is an origin story for a character whose origin isn't very interesting. Yes, his past was a mystery in the other films, but that is what made him fascinating. His journey to discover who he was one of the delights of the original trilogy. What makes Jason Bourne work so wonderfully is that we don't ever get a whole movie dedicated to him before he lost his memory. Instead we are given bits and pieces of his past at the same time Bourne is. By focusing a whole film on Wolverine's past, it removes any allure of mystery the character has. It also shows us that we pretty much already knew what happened to him prior to the first X-Men, so why even bother?
What I suspect was the original plan here was to introduce us to Team X, the covert team of mutants working for the government that Wolverine was a part of. This was going to be a jumping off point for a number of other characters we could follow. And to the film's credit, they got a number of classic characters and some pretty good actors to play them. The film then squanders this by not devoting any time to the team, as well as (SPOILERS) killing them all off (/SPOILERS). Wonderful character actors like Dominic Monaghan and Kevin Durand are given great characters and then wasted completely. Ryan Reynolds, who blew me away last month in Adventureland is set up to be a major part of the movie, only to immediately disappear. When he does resurface, he is robbed of his best quality. And the always wonderful Liev Schreiber is given the role of Sabertooth, who is apparently Wolverine's brother, but he never gets to anything other than yell and kill. There seems to be so much going on underneath the skin of the character, but Schreiber is never allowed to explore it. A movie about the relationship between these brothers would have been so much more interesting, but Fox wrongly thought audiences only want explosions and yelling, not character development.
The biggest sin of a major summer blockbuster like this is to be boring, but that's exactly what this film is. The action is pedestrian at best, lazy at worst. And dear lord the CGI is absolutely awful. Where did they spend all their money if they can't even make Wolverine's claws look real? Watch for a scene in the bathroom of a farmhouse and you will see some of the worst special effects in a major movie in many a years. I suspect the lazy action comes from a tension between director Gavin Hood and the studio. Hood is best known for the Oscar winning character drama Tsotsi, so it would make sense that he would want to focus more on the characters and less on the action. The studio must have pushed him to amp up the action, but they hired a guy who is not familiar with the basics of filming action sequences. The result is a film that is neither exciting nor especially deep in characters, as it couldn't choose between the two or fuse them into one cohesive product.
There just isn't much to really say about such a minor film like this. It's clear no one involved was very passionate about their work (except maybe Schreiber, who probably saw an opportunity to make an interesting character before it was neutered), and that lack of passion wears off on the audience. Will X-Men Origins: Wolverine kill this franchise? I think it just might. Not quite up to Batman and Robin levels of awful, it still clearly has nothing but contempt for the fans and the franchise. You can do a lot better than this film, and by summer's end I suspect this will be a minor forgotten note buried under bigger and better films.
