Too much action, too little character

Rating: 3/10 (19 January 2013)

Here's an irony for you: take one character out of a successful three-film franchise about a team of superheroes, put him in a film of his own... and he gets less character development than he did in any of the three previous films.
Apparently, the intention of producer Hugh Jackman and others with this film was to do more of a "character-driven" story. If that was their intention, they failed miserably. X-Men Origins: Wolverine suffers from far too little time spent developing character and, thereby, emotional resonance. Instead, we get an overdose of action. The problem is, when you don't care about the characters, you don't care about the outcome of the action very much, no matter how well-done those sequences are.
The opening title sequence, which shows Wolverine and Sabretooth fighting through over 100 years of war, is typical of this flick. Everything whizzes by so we can get to the next tidbit of eye candy. All the characters and their relationships are underdeveloped to the point of being caricatures. It's a shameful waste of talent, especially that of the two leads, Jackman and Schreiber.
This movie also commits a similar sin to that of the other recent X-Men movie (First Class): instead of focusing on the potentially-fascinating relationship between two leads, the filmmakers instead feel obliged to shoehorn in as many characters from the X-Men universe as possible. I suppose this is some attempt to court favour with the fans, but instead it just makes the movie worse; it takes time away from characters we should care about most, and leaves us with unsatisfying peeks at other characters who deserve more development.
Part of the fault lies with the very idea of trying to tell Wolverine's origin story. Anyone familiar with the character's long, convoluted back-story in the comics will tell you that there's just too much narrative to distill in a satisfactory fashion into a single movie. They would have been better off basing the film on Frank Miller's excellent Japan-based Wolverine mini-series, which leaves Wolvie's origins out of the narrative entirely. As I understand it, that's what they're doing for the next Wolverine movie, so I have hopes that it will turn out better. Then again, it couldn't be much worse than this noisy mess.