"Looks like we're gonna need new sheets again, baby"

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2009)

It is perfectly fitting that the new X-Men movie should include "Wolverine" in the title, since none of the three previous movies explained the history of his mutation, although slightly less fitting that "X-Men" should be in the title, because it is more like a spin off for Wolverine, the franchise's most popular character, than it is another X-Men movie. Granted, the histories of some of the other X-Men that we know are mentioned, such as Sabertooth, who is the result of Wolverine's brother Victor evolving along darker lines, and Cyclops also shows up, but for the most part we get Wolverine growing to understand his mutation as he is put into a team with a whole new group of mutants.
Not that that's a bad thing, of course. Die hard fans may not be so pleased to see that so little of the new movie has to do with the mutants that we know so far, and while my own knowledge of the comic books is absolute zero, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that the new movie is enjoyable even though it almost certainly doesn't live up to the expectations of the comic-thumping crowd.
The movie opens in northwestern Canada in 1840. Wolverine (now just Jimmy) and his brother Victor witness the brutal killing of their father which is almost exactly the same as the killing of young Rory Devaney's father in The Devil's Own, except for one crucial difference. You'll know it when you see it. It's a moment that comes dangerously close to an homage joke, but the recovery is thankfully quick. Their Canadian citizenship makes for a great scene late in the film that will have Canadian movie theaters erupting with cheers, although it doesn't explain why Jimmy and Victor fight side by side in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam which, unless I'm sorely mistaken, are mostly all more American wars than Canadian. Nevertheless, it's one of the movie's many great sequences.
Anyway, in Vietnam things get a little crazy. Victor loses his cool and has a confrontation with a senior officer that results in the death of one of them, and when a firing squad fails to kill them, they are offered a position on board a super-secret black Ops team so they can REALLY serve their country.
Well, they can serve their neighbors to the south, anyway.
What follows is Jimmy's journey to find a place in the world for himself, and all along the way he has to avoid being used for powers that he has but doesn't even fully understand yet, and he discovers a major project headed by William Stryker (Danny Huston), who is secretly planning to capture all of the mutants' powers and create a single super-mutant with the powers of all of them and, presumably, none of their weaknesses.
A lot of action tension falls away as it becomes more and more apparent that the relevant mutants, particularly Wolverine, are immune not only to death but to injury, but the entertainment level is high and the effects and photography are generally pretty good. There is some pretty disappointing blue-screen work late in the film in it's ambitious climactic scene, although to be completely honest, I was forced to watch a pirated DVD that I bought last week here in China that had 13 other movies on it. The picture quality is of course reduced, but more importantly, somehow someone got their hands on a copy of the movie where a lot of the visual effects weren't even finished, like external shots of planes flying and mostly the entire final scene. There was actually one point where Victor puts his hand on a window and a text label pops up saying "claws grow." I'm assuming that in the final version, his claws grew menacingly.
For those of you with access to American theaters, I hope you appreciate the sheer picture quality that you are able to experience, you don't know what you're not missing! X-Men: Origins is not the best X-Men movie (I would argue that X2 was the best so far) and it's a strange choice for director Gavin Hood, whose directing efforts include the hugely impressive 2005 film Tsotsi and 2007's Rendition. He has definitely hit the big time with this movie (like Alfonso Cuaron did when he was asked to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), although it seems like fans of his directing will be unimpressed with his latest choice, but those of us who remember him acting in bad action and horror films like The Curse III and American Ninja 5 will be thrilled at how far he's come!
But even though a lot of fans and critics may not be as impressed with the latest X-Men film than past entries in the series (Roger Ebert was pretty much a dick about the whole thing), X-Men: Origins is definitely a strong film considering that it's the third sequel. If they can keep them at least this good, they could easily squeeze out a couple more.