Has "rushed" written on it's forehead.

Rating: 5/10 (1 May 2009)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - We see Logan (Hugh Jackman)'s past, or a summary of it in the opening credits, and then flash forward to...either the 70's or 80's. I'm not sure. It's not very clear. In any case, the film follows Wolverine and Sabretooth and *sigh* another too long list of mutants through various shenanigans. There are some decent fights and a few funny and/or awesome moments, but it's unsatisfying overall.
I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong with what should have been better than X-men3 and probably X2 as well. Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber do their best and bring their A-game. Ryan Reynolds should have had far more to do in this film as he was great. Unfortunately writers Skip Woods (Hitman. ugh) and David Benioff cannot claim the same. The story is rushed and there are multiple points one just cannot get their head around. Why is Sabretooth doing the things he does? What is Stryker's ultimate goal and why does he get an entire sect of the American military to go along with essentially stupid ideas, in Canada no less? Why does it take a plane trip to get to a place we later see has bridge access to it?
What is apparent from these X-Men films is that two hours cannot support the number of characters they cram in. The fact that this was a Wolverine movie should have cued the writers into the notion that we want more Wolverine. It did not. The script is not awful, but offers little room for Wolverine to actually brood or have character moments or do anything but go from point A to point B. No one is really allowed to do much but confer plot, which is bad, because the writers gave little thought to the plot or the character treatments. Deadpool is more or less tarnished and Gambit's part is pretty insignificant.
What we have here is an unfinished feeling film due to a poor story. Admittedly, the X-Men comics were never as much about story as they were about cool looking characters dealing with isolation and whining about their pathetic lives inspite of their awesome powers. Nevertheless, Jackman and Schreiber deserved a better movie to be built around them. It's not bad, but I'll always wonder how much better a film this would have been if David Hayter has scripted it. C