A fun ending doesn't make up entirely for the mess that precedes it

Rating: 3/10 (6 May 2009)

Wolverine was like a sandwich made with good bread but poor filling. The opening and closing sequences were tasty, but the middle was pretty much an inedible waste of time.
I'm not a big comic book reader so I can't comment on the accuracy (or lack thereof) of characters like Gambit or Deadpool. Whether they are done well or not is the least of the films worries. What i can say is this: Gone is the brash, bold Logan of the first movies - replaced by a rather bland "all round nice guy" that's just not as fun to watch and far too predictable.
None of the character motivations seem to make much sense... People are good guys one minute, bad guys the next, good guys again the next - without any truly believable concrete events to signal such changes in behaviour.
Finally we're served up a hackneyed love affair subplot that's like a one-dimensional cardboard copy of every other romance plot out there. It's not fresh or engaging and the audience is consistently one step ahead of what's going to happen. Worse, there's no chemistry between the leads to suggest that they are really in love.
On the plus side, Ryan Reynolds was great... for the three or four minutes he's in the movie, that is. Liev Schreiber looked like he was the only one having any fun and so managed to energize his portions of the movie and elevate them above the general blah of the other scenes. The sfx are impressive and the action scenes deliver on the high pace, but sadly without any depth or rationale to the characters the movie falls flat. It's definitely the worst of the series so far.