Wolverine
Posted on May 14, 2009 1 Comment
Wolverine: The Good, the bad, and The Studio.
(warning, contains spoilers!)
The Good
Hugh jackman still stands as solid casting. No, he’s not short, wildebeast hairy, crotchety or ugly enough – but get real, it’s a movie.
But he is believable, genuine, and has the veins and the coif for it.
Liev Schriber is great as the re-booted Sabretooth, cleverly, née ‘Victor Creed’ rather than his callsign already tarnished by Taylor Mane in X-Men 1.
Deadpool pt.1 – Perfect and obvious casting of Ryan Reynolds. Everyone smelled a spin-off from the get-go . . .more on that later.
Blob. Solid casting. Best fatsuit I’ve ever seen in film – narrowly beats out Fat Bastard from Austin Powers.
The Bad
The plot is razor thin, contrived and frankly, inefficient. With all the technology Stryker had, you’d think he could come up with a more streamlined plan to create some mutant-bots. Like say, the plot of the second X-men film? His son already has the juice to control an army of mutants, and yet he apparenlty used Jason’s ‘juice’ to link Deadpool to a computer? Activated by command line?
While it was cool to see Gambit realized on film – I could have waited for a better first appearance that gives him more to do than fly a plane. (?!)
Also – Victor’s turn against his brother is unbelievable and ridiculous given the credit-introduction scenes of decades of their friendship and camaraderie.
And finally, one of the greatest travesty’s of the film is the utter destruction of one of the most popular and devlishly-likable characters in comic nerd-dom – Wade Wilson. Turning him into a cesspool of stolen mutant powers, none of which are surprising, all of which ridiculous and ineptly used.
Add to it the insane decision to remove the source of the charisma of the character – his mouth. He’s the ‘merc with a mouth’! Not ‘the merc with lazer eye beams, teleporting, healing, and sword arms which he instantly knows how to control better than the original owners’.
(And most of which they ‘cleverly’ set up with blatantly contrived exposition in his first scene)
At least they added the scene at the end where he puts his head back on . . . right?! Yuck.
The Studio
Fox is very obviously playing the hail-mary with all of their potential Marvel properties right now. Pumping and dumping as many X-Men/Wolverine/Deadpool movies out as they can until the properties revert back to the newly-studio-ized Marvel.
(responsible for the excellent Iron Man, satisfactory Hulk of last summer)
Their attitude started when Bryan Singer wanted to delay the promised X3 to do Superman – the studio got pissed, pulled him off the project and handed it to Brett ‘The Ratt’ Rattner with the agreement that X3 would beat Superman to theaters. (Turns out they had little to fear, X3 beat out Superman in BoxOffice despite a thinned plot and facepalm-ing direction)
They blew it by leaking the workprint, and blew it even further by basically obfuscating the fact that the workprint was, by and large, the final cut – sans final effects & sound. The alleged ‘pick up shooting’ and was nothing more than a total of 10 mins of ‘bonus’ footage shot for the alternate surprise endings.
One as a last-minute apology/appetizer for the next film which will inevitably be set in Japan and be focused on the Yakuza love interest storyline ( or some bastardized version of it where Gambit saves the day at the last minute by decapitating some Yakuza-sent mutant-ninja-robots)
Lest we mention the much-talked-about Storm shot from the trailer that mysteriously was cut from the film? Early advertisement for the DVD bonus material, anyone?
What could have been . . .
With so many themes of brothers, fathers (both real and false) this could have easily become a strong and meaningful theme in this film. The ideas were lightly touched upon: Logan’s post-murderous realization of his father’s true identity, the revealing of Victor as his half-brother and their following lengths of time together, Stryker’s half-step towards being a surrogate father, the X-team’s kinship, the girl’s pseudo-betrayal, and then Styker and Victor’s betrayal of Logan at the end . . . truly leaving Logan as an outsider, broken, betrayed, destroyed.
Maybe much more willing to have his mind erased as a side effect of Adamantium injection . . .
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Variegating
1. Having streaks, marks, or patches of a different color or colors; varicolored; mottled; dappled
2. Distinguished or characterized by variety; diversified.
Drew Pickard is a graphic designer employed at Pop in Seattle WA. He is an amateur photographer, a collector of Galactic Heroes, big-picture obsessor and has a lot of opinions about stuff.
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“his brain will grow back, but his memories won’t.”
uhhh…what?? worst piece of exposition in the whole thing me thinks.
and yeah, didn’t the procedure erase him memory? at least in the canon?