no matter how hard it tries, this is soulless, bloodless, unnecessary storytelling

Rating: 3/10 (7 May 2009)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine could be a prime example for what is superbly wrong with Hollywood film-making. There is a director credited here, Gavin Hood, who has made good movies such as Tsotsi. Perhaps they hired him for that, or for his previous film (unseen by me) Rendition. Or, further perhaps, they knew he could be pushed around for a good paycheck. Maybe he does love the Wolverine character and the X-Men franchise, but from a standpoint of only seeing the film as evidence, it doesn't look that way. This looks more to be a case of film-making-by-committee, where a whole gaggle of producers and studio heads (not least of which Tom Rothman) called the shots on what would happen in this story. Which, ultimately, wasn't really necessary in context of the other movies (or at least the first two).
Wolverine, as a character, is captivating and a bad-ass in the comics. In the first two films it's Jackman's performance, and some clever ambiguity, that make him worth watching and a pivotal character, of actually not knowing a whole lot about his past (save for some exposition and the character Stryker, then played by Brian Cox). By delving into this character's back-story, who from what I've heard and been told has one of the most convoluted and complicated backstories in the history of the comic-book medium, there's a whole lot of noise and whistles but not any depth. I didn't learn or gain anything about Wolverine/Logan/Jimmy(?) in the entire running time, except that if you possibly kill the love of his life then, well, he'll get revenge. And, really, if you had claws that could retract and lived over 150 years and was basically indestructible *before* Adamantium, you'd be ticked too.
Basically, it's a story that holds very little water to start with and has to work hard to give us something, anything, to care about what will happen to an indestructible man-beast like Wolverine. Jackman is game, but what about the other actors? Liev Schieber grunts and barely acts his way through his Sabretooth, while Ryan Reynolds, who may someday give us something as a version of Deadpool, only acts like that for all of five minutes before he's yanked off only to return late in the film (as apparently a very funny and witty self-conscious comic character in print) without any dialog to speak of! Others like Will.I.Am (yes, that's how his name is spelled) don't bring much at all, while there's some other room for thankless cameos - my favorite (by that I mean the one I was equally mortified and ironically amused by) was Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier, appearing before some lost mutants before disaster strikes, his face super-smooth and looking so CGI you'd swear Brandon Routh was neo-realist in comparison.
There's simply no invention, nothing that stands out even as a fun bad choice; this is more akin to Fantastic Four than something that is really *fun* bad like The Spirit or Ghost Rider. You have to keep your eyelids open by force just from not being bored by the films generic tendencies, most prominent when it tries to give some sense of humor (totally dulled or with the lowest common denominator of gag, i.e. "oh, my claws broke your sink, um, ha?), but especially when delving into the action sequences. No personality, nothing to make it stand out from probably much superior video games, and whatever inanities present can't even give rise to unintentional laughter. It's hack work through and through.
And the same goes with the story itself, and its super-duper-holy-s*** contrivances. Adamantium is one thing, that's a given, even if one wonders why Wolverine would need or want it thanks to his already near indestructible nature (sorry to harp on it again, it appears vaguely important to me given Wolverine's attitude towards it and Stryker). But the Amnesia-bullets... do I need to go on?