![]() As a creative decision, it’s hard to fault this kind of production. Unfortunately, the movie sees fit to dispense with that trove of potential material by the end of the opening credits and quickly devolves into boilerplate action and kiddie-pool-depth characters. Thanks to Marvel Comics’ desperate attempt to create more stories for one of its most popular characters, a comic book miniseries was crafted in 2001 that gave Logan a 19th Century birth date. ![]() X-Men Origins: Wolverine begins with a flashwayback that gives the character with the mysterious past and the go-to-hell demeanor the kind of backstory reserved for ageless vampires. Worse yet, Jackman’s Wolverine is relegated to a supporting role. Although it is the culmination of a satisfying story arc, Brett Ratner creates a movie without the humor and pathos of the previous two installments. With its added running time and bloat, X2 still moves briskly and purposefully toward a satisfying conclusion, but Singer’s touch is missing from X-Men: The Last Stand, the third film which collapses under its own weight. The second entry into the series, X2, follows Logan on his search for his past and introduces even more characters along with expanding on a compelling prejudice subplot. Singer’s X-Men was a lean and mean 100-minute romp through Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters where we meet a cavalcade of characters, each with his or her own unique mutation, but the mysterious Logan (aka Wolverine) is clearly the star of the show. From our first glimpse of the man, we know he’s not someone to be trifled with, and his introduction is comparable to some of the coolest in modern cinema (see Indiana Jones, Honey Ryder, Darth Vader, et al.) He is leaning against chicken wire, and chomping on a cigar in between cage fights where he has dispatched challenger after challenger with the kind of ferocity that only a man with superhuman regenerative powers and an adamantium coated skeleton could. He is blue jean legged, cowboy booted, and shirtless. In Bryan Singer’s X-Men, the 2000 film that introduced the popular Marvel comic mutants to the silver screen, we meet Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in a snowy Canadian roadhouse. ![]() I totally had my mutton chops first.”Įditor’s note: This review was written in September of 2009.
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