Epic Fail: the Movie

Rating: 1/10 (2 May 2009)

Where to begin with this one. Problems are numerous, including spotty acting, effects, and cinematography. I'm going to focus on the script for this review as it really looks like the writers wrote up a bunch of plot points, characters and trailer-ready fight sequences, and then tried to write a movie around them. The result is nothing short of disastrous.
For a movie that is supposed to give the origins of Wolverine, they did a good job of telling us exactly nothing about WHO Wolverine is. It's like they assume we know everything about the characters already, so there's no need to develop anyone's character. A movie should stand on its own. Origins: Wolverine is a one-legged dog.
Liev Schreiber and Hugh Jackman both do well in their roles, but the first 10 minutes of the movie are rushed and underdeveloped. It's too fast-paced, and the result is painfully uninvolving. They spend about 3 minutes as kids, in which we find out practically nothing about them. Then it literally cuts from them being kids running through the woods to them shooting people in the Civil War. The opening credits montage takes us through 150 years in about 3 minutes, and suggests that Logan is tired of being in wars and Victor loves it. This is all the information we get about who they are. By the time they're recruited by Stryker, they have interacted with each other approximately twice. Why do they join every single American war? Do they just like getting shot a lot? Why is Victor so bloodthirsty and Logan good? How did Logan and Kayla meet? How did Logan find out he was invincible? Does he feel anything about the fact that he killed his father? The filmmakers didn't care. This movie has all the depth of a piece of cardboard.
Victor's motivations are beyond murky throughout the whole film. He basically goes around killing characters for no real reason at all. Logan's relationship with his girlfriend starts out very poorly developed and actually becomes LESS believable by the end of the movie. In the one scene that is supposed to develop Logan and Kayla's relationship, she starts talking about some weird symbolic moon myths... its unintentionally hilarious. Oh, and it turns out she's a mutant and is hypnotizing Logan in order to watch him for Stryker, and fakes her death in order to make Logan to want revenge on Victor to force him into the Weapon X program so they could test the adamantium on him for the Deadpool project and then erase his memory in order to rescue her sister from Stryker. Seriously. But she really loves him! Uh-huh. They conveniently leave out how Logan and Kayla met, which at first seems like just lousy character development, but then you realizethat they skipped over this so that they wouldn't have to explain the exact circumstances of their meeting with her secretly spying on him. I suppose it was just too darn hard to for these guys to write. Lynn Collins is completely wooden, and I didn't care one iota for her character.
The lack of any believable characters leaves the movie plot-driven. But there's so many holes in the story that it's not even worth trying to find them all. This movie is basically a series of scenes, with very little connecting each one except Hugh Jackman's best efforts. Wolverine gets his jacket. Check. Wolverine gets his dog-tags. Check. Wolverines bone spikes somehow become giant knives when he gets his adamantium. The plot is not only convoluted and full of holes, but it completely negates itself in the last 10 minutes. Since Kayla ends up being alive, any tension created by the revenge scenario is totally wasted, and suddenly Victor is a good guy!? Everything was apparently done to create the super-mutant Deadpool (who doesn't have one single element of the comics Deadpool, except the name) who lasts about 10 minutes before dying by Logan's claws. That's the plot. Even though I know hardly anything about the comics, this is awful storytelling.
All of Stryker's team are pointless, Dominic Monaghan is totally wasted, Ryan Reynolds disappears after the first 10 minutes and never returns, and the team's individual powers are never explained at all. Kevin Durand can put his fist in a tank's main gun and stop a shell, and then he becomes grotesquely fat. Will I Am (what kind of name is this?), whose character is apparently named Wraith, is basically a rip-off of Nightcrawler. Gambit is just in this for the fanboys and doesn't even have the right accent. There's a guy who can do gun-kata. Wow, I didn't know shooting people like the guy in Equilibrium was a mutant ability! Cyclops shows up for very little reason but to give Deadpool cool eye beams. All of these characters are mere plot points, moving Logan from place to place and then dying or disappearing. It would be predictable if it weren't so unbelievably bad.
And the fights? Most are pretty short, inconsequential and bloodless. That's right, the savage Wolverine hardly doles out any real violence, only to his brother and to Deadpool, and since both have regeneration, and we know Victor and Logan will live, even the stabs have no stab. The cinematography and editing are pretty lousy. Remember the fight between Logan and Sabretooth from the first movie, on top of the Statue of Liberty? Or the White House attack with Nightcrawler from the second? There's no great techniques like those here, most of it is flat green-screening or total CGI shots. Some of the sets looks pretty cheap. Even the teleportation effects got worse in this one. The CGI is passable but not very realistic. All in all decidedly average visuals.
What's left at the end of all this is a movie with hardly any drive, substance or value. I'm disappointed that this was the best they could do with such great potential.