Oh for the love of God, please make it stop...

Rating: 4/10 (3 September 2009)

Okay... I'm going to TRY to do this. *Deep breath*
Wolverine is, by far, one of the most popular and iconic characters in Marvel. He is one of my favorite, and the mythos about him has been batted back and forth so much, you can pretty much pick and choose what you put in a particular origin story. As for X-Men Origins: Wolverine's origin story, the first hour or so of this movie actually was going well. Maybe a little more than an hour. That's when my cliché' alarm started to ring.
Because soon after giving Wolverine his Adamantium skeleton (from Colonel 'Let's stick Adamantium in it and call it a day' Striker) the movie suddenly starts tumbling down a hill of pointless plot twists, gratuitous Marvel Character cameos (Not that it wasn't gratuitous before) that makes X-Men: Evolution look like a finely crafted epic poem. I don't care that it's not in comic book continuity, or they screwed up little details. That doesn't bother me. It didn't bother me in the original X-Men movies, and it doesn't bother me now. What does bother me is the way the movie both races towards the finish line, and unnecessarily draws the plot out. It's like listening to ten year olds play with action figures. No, actually, it's more like watching a bad video game that SOMEONE ELSE is playing, complete with a boss fight at the end! That's right, a boss fight. For all you nerds that haven't seen it, in the end, Wolvering fights Deadpool. But not the real Deadpool, the teleporting, eye-blasting, adamantium-infused, pseudo-mutant Deadpool with no mouth. The only good point of that character is sewn shut before it begins. Brilliant, thanks a bunch for that boss fight. You can play as either Wolverine or Sabertooth, who isn't Sabertooth, but is. And his love interest is dead, only she isn't, it was all a trick, so she can come back at the end to... what, keep Logan's interest? Get him ticked off? Stop him from killing his brother? None of that appeals to me, he should kill the bastard completing the Cain and Abel parallel. Or is that too deep for you?
There's a desperate feeling in this movie to make a very R-rated character very PG-13, but I'm not on board with that. My feeling is if you're telling a story about a guy who goes ballistic with knives sticking out of his hand, there'd better be some limbs chopped off, and I want to see every gory second.
This was a movie written by a committee looking up Marvel Characters in Wikipedia and hammering out a script over the weekend. Then at the end they forgot 'Oh yeah, Logan's got amnesia, we need a plot device to explain that' and decided not to go with the quadrillions of Marvel Characters than can erase memories, and shot him with an Adamantium bullet. I wish I was making this up. Wait, no I don't, because it's retarded. There's a brief Patrick Stewart cameo in there for no reason other than yet another gratuitous 'Hey, nerds, look at this' moment. Also, why did they advertise the woman with diamond skin as the White Queen? More pointless name dropping? I'm genuinely surprised there isn't a slew of action figures and 'Wolverine cereal with little marshmallow Deadpools' to round out this fustercluck of marketing and nerditude. If you paid to see this, get half your money back. If you didn't, bravo. Neither did I.