Can anyone sell me back 2 hours of my life?

Rating: 1/10 (11 May 2004)

Within 5 minutes of the opening, I knew I'd made a mistake by entering the theatre. After 20 minutes, I began to think that the box office should issue cyanide capsules along with your ticket to this show. It's not much of a horror show, but it is a nightmare ordeal to experience.
There isn't much of a story or character development. There's barely an effort to create any sense of time and place. The dialogue and action is laughably insipid. There is never any sense of peril or suspense, because almost everything is obviously pasted together on a Mac. (NOTE TO DIRECTORS: If I can see that the hero is fighting a CGI monster on top of a CGI Notre Dame, rather than a monster with some physical presence on a set that resembles a real cathedral, what's so thrilling about that? Where is the sense of real danger? If I see a runaway stagecoach driving down a CGI path heading for a CGI canyon, what's supposed to make me care?) Even the costumes are out of place: Jackman is dressed like the mysterious, brooding hero of a postmodern Western, and Beckinsale in her bodice and lycra pants appears to have been pulled from a Meat Loaf video.
All that's here is Wolverine from the X-Men fighting some CGI versions of famous monsters, presented with a relentless assault of loud noise (in Surround Sound!), going through the paces of various ridiculous and implausible scenarios. I had to sit through it until the end because I was with a group, but I actually slipped out for 5 minutes in the middle just so I could get a break. Towards the end, I started to feel like I wanted to cry. Seriously. Like another reviewer said, I felt like Alex in A Clockwork Orange being forced to watch such horrible images until I broke. As I walked out after the show, I wanted to ask the concessions people if they could sell me back the last two hours of my life.
It was one of the worst movie-going experiences of my entire life. If somebody asks you to see this next weekend, save yourself. You might even consider breaking off a friendship to avoid this drain on the soul. Life is too precious to waste on dreck like Van Helsing.