The one with the rubbish Deadpool

Rating: 2/10 (15 February 2016)

After watching this years' Deadpool, the movie that got everything right, I thought I should review the film that came out back in 2009 that go so much wrong. The annoying thing is that the film starts off so promisingly, with a fantastic montage of Wolverine and Sabertooth fighting their way from the American Civil War to WW2 to Vietnam. Any one of those wars would have made for a fantastic movie on it's own, but instead we get a weak mutant team up in what was meant to be a solo adventure. This film is supposed to take place around 20 years before the events of X2: X-Men United (Where fifty year old actor Brian Cox was Stryker) and yet you have Danny Huston, an actor in his late forties when the film was made, playing the part of William Stryker. It just confuses me why you would pick an actor like Huston, Brian Singer did it way better by casting a young actor (Josh Helman) as Stryker in his early twenties in the excellent X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). And where's the blood? How many times does Wolverine stab Sabertooth in close up camera shots, showing no blood? Is Sabertooth filled with the same stuffing that Winnie the Pooh is filled with? I know it's a PG film, but still, c'mon guys... Unnecessary cameos come thick and fast too, from Black Eyed Peas members (Will.i.am, really?) to hobbits (Dominic Monaghan is completely wasted in a thankless cameo with three lines of dialogue). Plus a pointless Cyclops cameo. The only winner is Taylor Kitsch as Gambit, but even he is given little more to do than drop Wolverine off from a plane. Ryan Reynolds isn't to blame for this Deadpool-in-name-only portrayal here, it's the writers for this abomination. Happily with this years' Deadpool movie, all is forgiven. I hated Liev Schreiber as Sabertooth, he plays him like a reject from the Matrix sequels, like a goth with claws. Where was Tyler Mane from the first X-Men movie? I know he was a wrestler, but I thought he was great in the first one, and he was memorable as a Greek warrior in Troy (2004). The unnecessary recasting only adds to the confusion.
But the casting is only one of the problems. This movie has no idea what time it's events take place. it's supposedly the late 70s (It's never stated when the first X-Men film takes place, but the comic book adaptation of the first movie makes references to Bill Clinton, so this puts Origins in the late 70s, early 80s), but the computer readouts at Stryker's HQ and attack helicopters weren't around for another 15 years. And the CGI varies from passable to embarrassing. Wolverine's claws are really bad, considering the film's high budget. And the de-aged Patrick Stewart cameo in front of terrible blue screen? Urgh. Not to mention that after X-Men First Class, old Xavier walking now makes no sense. And the set where Wolverine gets his adamantuim looks nothing like the creepy lab that we saw in Logan's nightmares in X2, where where the people being killed? Agent Zero shoots him once, then he claws his way out of the base and runs off starkers to Ma and Pa Kent. Weak. The action scenes are forgettable too, with the one exception of the helicopter scene, but apart from that, pretty bog standard stuff.
I group this film along with X-Men: The Last Stand as the two X-Men films Brian Singer had nothing to do with and therefore do not count as official films. The events of Last Stand were happily given retroactive continuity due to Wolverine's time-traveling in X-Men: DOFP and this film can be just as easily forgotten due to both Stryker and Deadpool being done properly by Brian Singer and Tim Miller.