A joke, but a good one

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2009)

Here's a movie that deserved every criticism it got, and is still pretty good. Yes, the script is horrible, and the story worse. Yes, the characters do things that make no sense just to push the movie along. No, it's certainly not a movie that does any justice to its titular character. But it's still kind of fun.
Let me explain. You take three issues of any comic book, read them in order, a lot of the time, it's not gonna make much sense. But the word bubbles are so small, the pictures are so big, you don't really care. The characters do some crazy things, and it looks good. That's this movie all over. It starts with Wolverine, hero of the "X-Men" trilogy, as a child in pre-Canada Canada. He and his older brother go through some incomprehensible family trouble; Wolverine sprouts his bone claws, shouts "NO!" up into the air and the opening credits montage starts. That's what kind of movie this is.
Wolvie and his brother grow up, his brother becomes Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber), and they fight through every major American war together, simply to do it I guess. Maybe the film's director, the artistically higher-minded Gavin Hood, wanted to portray Wolvie and his brother as salt of the Earth, regular Men-type characters. It works good enough I guess, but all we get is a couple neutered fight scenes and a lot of snarling for the camera. They come off more like figures in the opening sequence of a video game, where you're waiting for the game to start.
So Wolvie and Creed join this covert group of mutant spies/soldiers, one of them is Ryan Reynolds, one of them is Will.i.am, they each have powers, and so on. They go to another country and we get some impossible (but still aesthetically-pleasing) action scenes where some of them get to demonstrate their powers. Something happens, they get split up. Wolvie ends up living with a schoolteacher who is strangely good at "persuasion" (a bizarre attempt at subtle foreshadowing in a movie about people with superhuman powers).
The woman, her character, is the glue that ties the whole movie together and the underlying joke beneath everything. She's given a couple lines in the beginning to create some sort of totally misguided Native American mystical past for her, but all we're thinking is, "Who is she, and why is she in the movie?" Wolvie's in love with her, or at least acts like he is, which is to say Hugh Jackman tries his best to act like he is, but there's absolutely nothing there and everyone seems to know it. She's a shameless, walking Plot Device, and the final bit of fate dealt to her character, and Jackman's final moment with her, is like a hilarious punchline to the idiocy of the whole story.
Everything else has Wolvie running around, sprouting his claws, meeting some semi-to-actually-kinda-interesting characters like Blob and Gambit, and running in slow motion to do battle with his brother, Creed. Schreiber plays this role with real commitment and gusto, and an apparent lack of interest in how he looks. He comes off so crazy and ruthless he achieves that insane cartoon level of acting you see sometimes from Johnny Depp or, say, Danny DeVito in "Batman Returns." This movie really made me like Schreiber; I want him to take more roles like this one in the future.
Listen, it's not great. But it is funny – be that intentionally or not – and it has some beautiful action scenes, particularly one atop a giant smoke stack at the end. They're not beautiful in concept or execution, just in the childish innocence of it all. See it once, or a couple times, for a few laughs.
7/10