A decent action movie but...

Rating: 5/10 (4 May 2009)

Great script, great sets, fleshed-out characters, forget about them, you're not going to find it here. If you love X1 and X2 for all those things stated above, most likely you'll dislike this movie. What you'll get, are actions, plenty of 'decent' actions. This is not the Wolverine origin story fans were waiting for.
As an origin story, this movie fails at so many levels. This movie should've chronicled the birth, the life and times of Wolverine, the origin of adamantium itself, leading all the way to project Weapon X and Wolverine losing his memory. Wolverine first appeared in comics in mid 70s and is one of the most famous modern superhero of the bronze age era for god's sake. The filmmakers should have a lot of material to work with and they should've treated a character this big with respect. Yet they managed to sum up the first couple of hundred years of Wolverine's life in a 5 minute opening montage and have little to no story nor character development for the rest of the movie. Events leading to the climax are a bunch of action sequences stringed together by shallow dialogue scenes. We never learned why wolverine stopped aging at his age, after aging for hundreds of years; in fact, nothing is explained. Just like X3, many characters appear and not handled well, as if they appear for no reason other than for merchandising purposes.
As an action movie, the actions are okay and entertaining enough, it should satisfy anyone who just wanna watch Wolverine slicing and dicing at anything that comes at him. Excessive wireworks hurt the fight scenes, save for one big fight at the end. For a 150 million dollar movie, the special FX look unconvincing at times, especially ones involving explosions, but overall looks fine for a summer blockbuster.
It's hard to appreciate this movie after last year's Iron Man and The Dark Knight. So, if you expect this movie to be as good as X1, X2 or Iron Man and TDK, you might want to stay away from this.
If you can appreciate the action sequences, you might enjoy it. It's at least fast-paced and not boring for an action movie, there's always action every a few moments.
6.5/10