I need an amnesia bullet to forget this film...

Rating: 5/10 (11 June 2009)

Great super hero films only come around as often as Hailey's Comet. That means last year was miraculous: two great super hero films in the same year. 2009 will not be so lucky. "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" has come to fill the void between "The Dark Knight" and the next great super hero picture.
To put it simply: it gets it wrong, very, very wrong. It has a hero with no physical or emotional vulnerability. It has plenty of action with nothing at stake and violence with no consequence. And the very goal of this origin story is to build a character, and it can't even do that right.
The story is about the beginnings of Wolverine. At first he's just a boy named James Howlett living in 19th century Canada with his brother Victor. James witnesses the murder of his father and kills the attacker, only to learn the attacker is his real father. James and Victor dash into the woods, and through the magic of editing we leap into the future, where James and Victor become Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber. They fight in nearly every major American war, they join the special weapon X program, and turn against one another when Victor murders the love of James's life. This leads James to be injected with adamantium, making him invincible, change his name to Wolverine, and seek revenge against his brother.
And throughout all of this Hugh Jackman doesn't do much besides smirk, snarl, growl, say bub a few times and scream. He does a lot of screaming. There are long action sequences where Wolverine just stands around while other mutants do the fighting. Liev Schreiber attempts to inject some personality into his role but he's a lost cause in a film like this.
About those other mutants, there are a lot of them. Most of them are unnecessarily jammed into the story to make the fans happy. There's agent Zero who doesn't seem to have any specific power, just a lot of them. There's the blob, an obese boxer who looks like a combination between fat bastard and Billy idol. Ryan Reynolds is dead pool, aka "the merc with the mouth", who's one-liners provide the films only humor. We see him later on with his mouth sewn shut. And Cyclops shows up late in the film, just to show up.
The most insulting of all is Gambit, my personal favorite X-Man. His only purpose is to take Wolverine from point A to point B in his air plane. Taylor Kirsch is terribly miscast, and extremely bland. His Cajun accent flickers on and off. His power is having a magical stick that provides an over kill of mediocre special effects.
And despite an onslaught of special effects, none of them impress. It never seems as if this was a 100 million dollar film, even though the budget was 150 million dollars. I would have guessed 60 million. The effects lack the polish and level of detail you would expect from such a project. There's a scene where Wolverines claws are so poorly rendered they look hand drawn. There's a scene where an entire barn is engulfed in an explosion and Wolverine emerges from it without a single singe of his hair or clothes, while riding on top of a gasoline powered motorcycle that isn't so much as scratched. There are major editing mistakes to go along with the effects. There is a scene where Wolverine walks far away from a building only to reappear in it a split second later.
To be fair I've seen worse. This inst a terrible film, but its bad in the sense that I can't say any thing positive about it. There is no point in watching it. It takes two hours just to tell you something you already know, and to tell you things you would never want to know, like the cause of Wolverines amnesia. It's just a complete waste of time and money, the time and money it took to make it and the time and money it takes to watch it.
This film was directed by the formerly independent Gavin Hood, who's film "Tsotsi" won an Oscar for best foreign language film. This film was a modest hit so don't expect Tsotsi 2 any time soon.