X-Men Origins: Wolverine leads me to one, and only one conclusion: Gavin Hood has never seen an action film. I don't think there's anything really wrong with hiring a journeyman to helm an action film. I'd much prefer to see someone like Zack Snyder or Bryan Singer behind the camera on this, but one misguided hack is probably worse than a journeyman who will do what the producers and star tell him to do. Probably.
I guess I'll come out and say that this is probably a better film than the first and third X-Men films, but I'm still way fucking disappointed. A character as awesome as Wolverine, played by an actor as great and perfectly cast as Hugh Jackman, throw in some big action setpieces and start exploring his tragic backstory and relationship with his psychopathic brother Sabretooth, how in the shit can you go wrong? Well, I imagine it took about thirty men in labcoats, some test tubes and at least one Tesla coil, but they got a formula going.
Here's the solution to the problem of "this movie is absolutely guaranteed to be good with this awesome plot": plot the shit out of that motherfucker.
Now, dear uneducated reader, let me explain something to you. There's a big difference between "plot" and "story". Every film has to have a story, but not every film has to have a plot. And since this is a very abstract concept, I'm going to explain it as simply as I can so that you don't get bogged down in vague extrapolations. A plot is a sequence of events, causes and effects, that lead to a climax that is the dramatic culmination of everything that's happened in the film. A film without a plot (although every film has a plot, I'm just coming up with two different words for the sake of simplicity) has a series of causes and effects, but not everything is reliant on the cause-effect nonsense. There will be many scenes with no effect on the storyline, things that may explore characters and setting, but don't help Nancy Drew solve the mystery.
See what I mean? Of course you don't.
My point is that Wolverine falls somewhere between these two. Covering a series of events that stretch over hundreds of years, the best way to do this is to have it be a series of events that shape Wolverine into the person we know him in the X-Men films.
And they do this. Sort of. For the first hour or so. And then they decide that they need more plot. So it become a race against the clock(!) for Wolverine to stop the evil Colonel Stryker for creating the ultimate mutant killing machine(!). Meanwhile, there's a twist ending, a feel-good moment that got me to put my head in my hands, a very, very, very contrived set-up for a showdown with the villain on top of something very tall and an attempt to make the events of this film mesh with the events of the other X-Men films that made my brain punch its way out of my skull and attack the screen.
My point is that if you're going to do a meandering, Scorsese-style narrative, awesome! If not, awesome! But don't pine for one and fuck the other. These two portions of the film mesh with a loud scraping sound and some sparks. And it doesn't help that characters are introduced and discarded like we're reading a J.K. Rowling book (or watching the third X-Men film) and some characters are inexplicably given an extra scene, just to turn the fanboy vaginas into swimming pools.
But all that can be ignored if the film delivers on the biggest promise of a summer action film: the action. When I saw the shots in the trailer of Wolverine duking it out with a helicopter and propelling himself onto the roof of it by vaulting off an exploding humvee, it was appropriately death-defying and exciting in the manner of old 80's action films. And when I saw the shot of him walking away from the exploding helicopter (which was apparently delivering a metric ton of plutonium to the needy farmers in the area), I was excited for a big action setpiece that was a throwback to the classic action setpieces of the 80's.
Unfortunately, this is the only successful action setpiece in the whole film, so it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, like the filmmakers weren't winking and nudging the audience, they just genuinely thought that this is how action films should look. The whole film gets stamped as cheesy because it's the only memorable action scene.
But the biggest problem, the worst sin the film commits is when Wolverine finds his way out of the Weapon X facility. In X-Men 2, Wolverine has a flashback to this moment where he remembers sprinting out of the building, naked and covered in blood before Wolverine wakes up screaming in his bed. Truly horrific. But when he escapes the Weapon X facility in this film, he seems positively enamored of his new toys and triumphantly dashes out of the building as if he just won a...naked contest. Or something.
And there are a few parts where the CGI is quite awful and where the A/V isn't synced. If I go see a $125 million film, I expect to see some synced A/V.
That's not to say the film is all bad. Well...it sort of is. But Hugh Jackman is fantastic in this. His presence is invaluable to the film, and Liev Schrieber seems like he's having a lot of fun as Sabretooth. And, while I'm a big Danny Huston fan, he's not really at the top of his game here.
Ultimately, I can't figure out what went wrong here. Someone like Hugh Jackman should know how to make a good Wolverine film. I think the entire thing could have been saved if Zack Snyder or Bryan Singer or Len Wiseman (who was rumored for the job before Gavin Hood came on) had directed. I'm not familiar with Gavin Hood's work, but I know he wasn't familiar with the Wolverine character when he was signed on and according to people whose opinions I trust, both Tsotsi and Rendition are quite mediocre. As far as I can tell, Gavin Hood's signature style is bland mediocrity.
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