Good enough. It wasn't a blast off start to the summer ala Iron Man, and as a movie it was pretty poorly contructed, despite hugh jackman and liev shcreiver doing what they could, but it was an entertaining blockbuster flick. I don't know, if you have to pay for this shit, I would just wait for Star Trek and save your cash, but if you're just wasting your time than you might as well watch this.
I thought the other members of the "team" were a lot cooler than wolverine and sabertooth are and wish they had more focus, I never understood the fascination of wolverine in general, he's one of the lamest superheroes IMO. But that doesn't mean the movie has to be terrible
It was interesting to see how everything happened and the story was okay, not great, but worth watching I guess.
5.5/10

Yeah, it's not really that good. It doesn't have the ridiculous bad movie fun of X3, and it's nowhere near as good as the first two. It just lingers in no man's land, neither good nor bad enough to be worthwhile.

Its biggest problem is that it turns into just another X-Men film at the end, instead of actually telling an origin story. Did we really need another fifty mutants? What was wrong with just Wolverine and Sabertooth?

Plus, it's chopped to bits, lamely directed, and rather cheap-looking. I can't imagine the workprint was that unfinished, though I never watched it. This has the feel of an unpolished film, through and through.

Hopefully they just let this series die quietly.

D at best.

The movie makes X3 look like Citizen Kane. There's a lot wasted here. I liked Will.I.Am's character and Gambit and even some of the other casting choices but it feels like 3 movies crammed into one. I think I would have rather seen Wolvering, Maverick, Bolt, Sabertooth, etc. go after drug lords in Nigeria with Stryker then have it just a 15 minute introduction followed by a story that didn't make much sense to me.

The special effects are awful, but the chemistry between Jackman and the other actors was there, so there was just a lot of missing, empty pieces.

One of the things with the X-Men films was that they were not cartoony comic-book films but as the leader of the pack they took far out concepts and tried to make them as real as possible. I think all three X-Men films before this delivered on that, even with the problems of X3, but this took things too cartoony and too ridiculous.

An average action movie to say the least. The one thing that had me excited was the fact that Gambit was in this. He is my favortie of the X-Men so I was sad to see him only get 5 mins of screen time. Everyone pretty much knows the story of Wolverine so it felt like it was just going through the motions. I hope they don't make anymore Origins movies and make X4 with Gambit and the Sentinals. With the success of Transformers, you would think this would be a no brainer.

C

Yet I saw it again last night, and it definitely IS him.

And guess what? Weapon XI was pretty much the last person listed on the credits, meaning it was just to give the stunt guy credit for the stunts.

my problem with the movie was they tried to make is origin huge. If they were going to do that, just tell half of it and let the sequel tell the other half. It would have made for a much better paced film.

agreed

I don't understand why everybody is being so kind to this movie.

My final review of the year... I tried to be really honest in that its a really crappy movie, but is pretty damn entertaining. What do you guys think?

http://nevadasagebrush.com/blog/2009/05 ... rtunities/

Read the review. This is a serious question... not being snarky or anything. What is it about it that is particularly entertaining?

I found the effects attrocious (see the bad effects on the motorcycle sequence and the ending... these are some of the worst effects I've ever seen on a Blockbuster of this size) and I thought the fight scenes lacked any sense of impact or urgency or framing, perhaps, other than the mid-movie Canada fight between Sabretooth and Wolverine.

Jackman is a good actor, granted, I like him in nearly anything... Australia, The Fountain, Prestige, take your pick... and he's always good as Wolverine, but I thought they really took the teeth out of the character and the duality of Wolverine to an extent... he was conflicted by his situation with his brother but his angst wasn't in "being the hero".

why aren't you reviewing anymore?
It's a good review, one of the best I've read of yours. You sound sincere and open-minded as well as intelligent, and not superior like you have before. I agree with it for the most part, but I think your rating (C-) conflicts with your comments. Personally i hate letter grades, but that would be a like a 1.5-2 on a five star scale, yet your comments seem like a 2.5-3, IMHO. It's clear you think it's a bad movie, but you also found it entertaining, which is undoubtedly the point of the film, to entertain, rather than to be a quality production.

I've never read any of the comics so, here's what I found entertaining:

-opening credits. really awesome and educating
-Ryan Renolds, Zero (gun dude),
-seeing Stryker's son as a kid
-Wolverine's angst is actually not bad. It has problems but I felt it. I mean, he kills his step dad as a kid! come on! that was enough in itself
-gambit's attack with playing cards.
-creation of and powers of deadpool
-young cyclops (although the hot James Madsen was very missed)
-all of the locked up mutants on the island.
-finding out that the wife is a double crossing bitch (although she makes it up for it in the end)
-sabertooth jumping around
-the fact that I kept saying "ouch" throughout the movie. It may not have been graphic, but there was violence there that was cringe worthy which makes it "entertaining"

and much more

You seem to believe that these are diametrical terms.

They shot it in full-bodied color rather than black-and-white.

Not necessarily, but it's important to acknowledge that they are not the same thing, at least not in all cases. A movie can certainly be entertaining and a quality production (TDK comes to mind) and a movie can be a quality productions without being entertaining at all (this is how I personally saw Citizen Kane) and then a movie can be very entertaining but a terrible production (I think Underworld 3 is a better example than this, but I would file Wolverine somewhere in this category)
And of course, a movie can be neither, ala Jumper.

Yeah, I guess I worded that wrong. Its my final official review of the school year which ends for me this week. I am going to be doing a summer movie blog for the paper, which does not print during the summer months, but I will not be publishing any official reviews most likely. But yeah, thanks for the comments!

I have received a few comments now on how it is kind of confusing in that i praise it for being entertaining, yet call it a bad movie... Many people look at movies in many different ways. For those that go casually, I think they would call an entertaining movie a good movie. For those of us who watch a lot, I think we are divided in that a movie is either bad or good or it is one or the other plus entertaining or not. I view most movies in the second respect in that entertainment value, especially for summer blockbusters, is a whole different aspect that you have to look at when judging a film. Again, my view points on critiquing movies seem to differ greatly from most here, but I feel that all movies are created with some kind of purpose and if they succeed in some way at what they were trying to accomplish, the parts they did do right should not go unnoticed. So if I were to give Wolverine a grade purely based on how good of a movie Wolverine is, I probably would give it a D. But since it featured (or i thought so anyways) enthralling over-the-top action sequences and those corny one liners we have come to love, I felt it did not deserve such a harsh grade.

But hey, what did you mean by "superior"? Do I sound egotistical in some of my reviews?

In some of them, yes. It's a problem I think any movie fanatic has, you're taking to people who probably watch 5-20 movies a year, and many of us watch 50 plus (just movies of that year I mean) so it's hard not to sound like "you know all that" when writing a review.
Your one of the better about it, you usually sound pretty even headed, but in your MVA review for example, IMO, you sounded like you were talking down to everyone.

Hummm... good to know, I really appreciate your honesty. I'll definitely try and work on that in the future

6/10 -> C

Surprisingly fun at times, and surprisingly with lots of visible potential for being a damn good X-Men movie. But that didn't really work out as it should have.

The casting is great - Jackman, Schreiber, Reynolds were particularly great. I'm amazed at how Reynolds managed to craft an annoying (as he should be) character in the complete 4 minutes he was in this movie. Jackman is as always great as Wolverine (though I still think they need to change Wolverine's beard in the movies. It's a bit hideous looking on Jackman from certain angles. Schreiber is a reliable actor and he delivers a very strong Sabretooth. Kitsch was very good as Gambit too. I only didn't like Huston as Stryker. He was bland. Other characters were good but each one of them got a total of 2 minutes of screen time, so they're really not even supporting here.

The story is a mess. The basic idea could've definitely worked as a great origin story, but the script needed a lot of work. The main problems are Wolverine's motives. Something that should be the strongest part of an origin story. The opening scene and why Logan and Victor ran felt rushed - the motive of Logan killing his father is great, but the whole scene turned out like it was a Sy-Fy production. I never cared for his revenge (the girl playing Kayla was awful. No on screen presence and no believability whatsoever - thankfully they realized her antitalent in True Blood and used her only as a fuck doll for Sookie's brother and got rid of her pretty quickly) as it was too obvious he was being set up (and thus the twist with Kayla, which was decently imagined, didn't work). The power of female persuasion??? Yeah right, awful job at giving a hint writers - we're watching an X-Men movie, not a fucking Lifetime movie. Also the suspense was never there as we knew what characters would survive, etc.

I won't go too much into logic (I see some here are very harsh toward Wolverine about certain things like adamantium bullets and memory loss) as the same can be applied to previous X-Men movies and all of them could be shredded into pieces if we were to apply the usual logic and common sense to their stories. In the context of the created universe the story and the logic of the story works.

The action scenes were damn good. SFX were a bit iffy (they seem unfinished even still), but the fights were good and there were some nice shots of power uses.

I for the most part didn't like the direction. There are far too many wide shots of cities/terrain/roads/forests and the camera felt too distant a lot of times. Gavin Hood was not a good choice for this kind of a movie.

The bottom line is that the movie is all over the place. But it still manages to be very fun.

The Joss line at the end is great. He did raise some good points though. What it made me realize is how much this movie resembles Heroes, which is an X-Men ripoff to begin with. There are twists for the sake of twists throughout the movie, only a few of the characters have any purpose, finale is a massive fail, and it's always trying to trick you into thinking that it's going to start being good.

First of all, i'm a huge X-Men fan....though the trailers had me worried. My expectations weren't that high.

THe movie itself was so so, doesn't compare to any of the first 3 X-Men flicks but wasn't THAT bad. The potential was there, though they didn't execute this very well i think. There were a lot of flat momments and some WTF momments. The jokes came across as lame and some scenes were just a bit cheap and disconnected...i.e. the scene where Gambit starts to say "i've been in there for 2 years" and then Wolverine just knocks him in the head. For me, that was not funny, it was just WTF and stupid. Though the fight scene between Wolverine and Gambit was pretty good, should've expanded it a bit.

What I did like was the way some elements tied this into X1, totally didn't expect them to connect the two movies that well. While I knew that Xavier was going to show up in the end (right after Cyclops hears a voice)....the scene where Xavier walked out of the helicopter...at first i thought that may have been Magneto.....afterall, there is talk of a Magneto Origins story and Magneto as in X3, did work with Xavier at the start to recruit students. But anyhow, nice to see this connection.

Overall I give this a 6.5/10......I give X-1 a 7/10, X2 a 9/10 and X3 a 7.5/10.

I wanna see more X-Men

Does anyone know who were the mutants locked up at the Island facility in the end.

Besides Cyclops and Emma Forst of course....I could make out Toad and Stryker's son (in another scene).....though who were the other mutants.....in one cage there's a frozen girl....in the other a puff of wind (is that Storm?) and one who is bandaged up....

I'm dieing to know....

Storm would have to be there since she was on the trailer but was cut out from the final product.

There was one that kept on bouncing around. Was that Speedball? lol

The weakest of the four X-Men films by far. It actually renders itself pointless by the end of the film. If you're going to wipe his memory clean, what's the point of what he's gone through? What has Wolverine learned? Does anyone care? I'd like to think so. We just wasted 90 minutes for pretty much nothing. Actually, the last 20 minutes aren't good at all. Cheesy would be a good word for the last act of the film. Yet despite the film's cheesiness, I had fun. There's hardly a human emotion to be found in the film, the effects range from great to awful (pretty much the last 20 minutes), and yet the action scenes are just good enough that I wound up being distracted by all the film's faults and just had fun with what was happening.

Now as a serious comic book film (one that's in the same series as the X-Men films; I'm not talking about something like The Punisher or Ghost Rider), it could've and should've been better. As a matter of fact, compared to the first three (yes even The Last Stand) it's almost a complete and utter failure in terms of storytelling. The movie does nothing to disprove the fact that the introduction of Wolverine in the first film was a good enough origin. Yet I had fun, so it's not a complete waste of time?

**½