X Men Origins:  Wolverine

This movie is bad.  I wasn't betting on a prequel movie about Wolverine, perhaps the most overrated superhero ever, to be that good but just how bad it ended up being simply stunned me.  How bad is this movie?  The answer lies in this scene, supposedly the emotional center of the tale.  A pensive and brooding Logan sits in his log cabin living room deep in some of those mountains somewhere in Canada, his lover, the aptly named Kayla Silverfox, stares out at into the night sky and says:

"Do you ever wonder why the moon is lonely?"

Logan plays up the attractively shallow brute, and his lady then launches into a monologue detailing some phony Native American legend not worth repeating and they end up making out. 

AAAAHH!!!  It's just this kind of scene that kills otherwise well-meaning comic book movies.  Upon hearing the above line I could actually feel my brain cells screaming in pain.  It didn't start out so bad.  The audience is first treated to a fun though brief little jump back to Logan's childhood in the 1800s to uncover the original connection between Wolverine and Sabretooth and the reason why Logan is always so dang depressed, both of which boil down to an event that happens in about three minutes.  Then a visually arresting opening credits montage ensues showing the ferrel fréres taking part in every war they can enlist in from the Civil War to Vietnam.  From there they get drafted into a mutant special forces squad doing black ops for a suspicious Colonel Stryker (anyone with that name just can't be a good guy).  Logan gets cold feet about killing innocents, quits the team, runs away to some mountains in Canada, finds a supermodel ditz of a wife and pretty soon sitting around the campfire listening to her talk about about why the frickin' moon is lonely!!!  AAAAH!!!

Of course, things don't stay that way for too long.  All hell breaks loose once Logan's old buddy Sabretooth goes missing and starts bumping off former members of the team.  Cue explosions, about a hundred incidental characters showing off their powers and more really really bad writing.  In parts, the special effects are just bad, which is unfortunate since it's at just those points that the movie is relying on eye candy.  The camera lingers unabashedly on the obviously CG rendered claws as if nothing is screwy.  There's just no reason to CG the dang things.  Prosthetics just aren't that hard!!!  I swear, I'm going to start a list of unnecessary digital FX.  This ranks just behind George Lucas superimposing Temuera Morrison's head onto a completely CGed suit of stormtrooper armor.  I was positively screaming at the screen.  PUT THE GUY IN A SUIT!!!!  AAAAH!  But I digress.  Many other shots suffered.  They got sloppy on Professor X showing up in a chopper to save a bunch of fleeing mutant lab-rats.  It's so clear that neither the set, the props nor any of the actors were in the same place at the same time.  Why?  What's so hard about getting everybody together and shooting a real life shot instead of cobbling together a poor patchwork green-screened images.  It's laziness that actually ends up causing more work for the post-production dept. and costing more money.

There's really not much more to say.  Will. I. Am is horrible, LOST stars Dominic Monaghan and Kevin Durand don't even seem like they're even trying and Taylor Kitsch puts on a crappy creole accent to play fan fave Gambit.  Granted these guys seem to have been given dialogue that was written by a 13 year old taking a screenwriters' correspondence course at a community college so it must be insulting.  Only Ryan Reynolds is able to pull off the snarky Deadpool character, another long-awaited character for fans (though his backstory is seriously tampered with).  But that's 'cuz Reynolds is a huge Deadpool fan.  Likewise, you gotta be a huge Wolverine fan to overlook the long list of aesthetic crimes this film commits.  But it's especially the fans that hate to see their beloved superheroes handled so carelessly.  But perhaps the story is uninspired to begin with.  Wolverine is one of the original antiheroes, and today, antiheroes are all there is.  Films are so saturated with 'the dark side' of our protagonists that there may not be anywhere to go with a character like Wolverine these days.  What more is there to be explored about the exaltations and consequences of revenge and violence that directors like Clint Eastwood haven't already gone into?  How is Wolverine any different from all the other badasses out there?  Here is where the source material fails the film.  Wolverine has always been a two-dimensional superhero through and through and though Gavin Hood and his crew didn't have to butcher the tale so much, he probably found himself without any more interesting direction to go.

But really, "Do you ever wonder why the moon is lonely?" there's just no excuse for that.

State of Play

State of Play recontextualizes a 2003 BBC TV series into a contemporary American setting.  Russel Crowe and Rachel McAdams play two reporters trying to discover the truth behind a murder that might be connected to the contention between an idealistic senator (Ben Affleck) and a corporation responsible for supplying mercenaries to the U.S. government.    Mercenary activity in Iraq and Afghanistan is a spicy enough topic for a political thriller but the film's drama centers more around the rules of reporting and the tension between America's societal institutions than the kinds of thrills one would expect from one of the Bourne films.  Our heroes find themselves at odds with the competing interests of the police, military, congress and even their own newspaper.  The film follows in the tradition of more refined political thrillers like "All the President's Men" and "Breach".  There are more boardroom shouting matches than gunfights.  The film manages to keep a decent amount of intrigue but leaving the murder unsolved until the very end is like dangling a carrot out in front of a horse making the 2-hour runtime feel like an unnecessarily long haul for the final payoff.  

In a thriller like this, actors are little more than placeholders and with the exception of an entertainingly sleazy Jason Bateman, the cast wisely goes no further than that.  Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams play things close to the belt and Russel Crowe fits right into his role.  There's something to be said for an actor who is best known for epic parts like a Roman gladiator, a schizophrenic mathematician and an 18th Century ship captain, who is just as good at portraying normal American citizens (no small task for a native Aussie).  He's not the flashiest actor in the world but his understatement is his strength.  

State of Play  is cliché, but not boring.  Government thrillers rarely try to shoot the moon with contemporary relevance or emotional depth.  It's good enough to keep the audience guessing and provide a few thrills in a realistic environment.  The problem with State of Play is that it doesn't take the time to construct a solid infrastructure of subplots to adequately support its final conclusion.  The unexpected finale makes an otherwise good film feel slightly careless.  The final plot twist comes so out of left field it would make any attentive viewer groan.  In my view it's better to run the risk of predictability in the interest of a sensible outcome than to ensuring a surprise ending by using improbable leaps of logic.  Still, the film is not bad, and if you can keep your brain from being too offended by the ending, then it is easy to admit that the film is entertaining, though not much else.