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.