Is X-Men Origins: Wolverine a good movie? I can tell you that it is, but not with a straight face. But did I see it twice in the theaters when it first came out? Fine, I will admit it. But why? I don’t really care for any of the X-Men movies. They are at best, OK sci-fi action movies, but not a single one of them is a good adaptation of their source material. So what keeps me coming back to Origins: Wolverine? It’s tough to say, but it does have an interesting nutso energy. The Japan-set flick The Wolverine is definitely the better film, but I remember way less of it than I do of this hot mess.
This is a movie that features a lumberjack-themed showdown between Hugh Jackman’s Logan and Liev Schriber’s Sabretooth. Also what? Tony Award winning Liev Schriber, that dude your mom thinks is hot, is subbing in for Tyler Mane to play Sabretooth? Ryan Reynolds gets to play a DINO (Deadpool In Name Only)? And he gives it his all? Dominic Monaghan, the hottest of the hobbits, still riding high as a star on Lost plays… a lightbulb circus mutant? Will.I.Am in a cowboy hat? Taylor Kitsch making his play at being a leading man? Emma Frost shows up for 15 seconds and is a member of the First Nation Blackfoot Confederacy? What is happening here?
You can’t shake the feeling that Origins: Wolverine doesn’t care. There’s almost a casual indifference in Logan’s reaction to seeing Fred Dukes fully embrace his Blob persona (“I didn’t call him Blob, I said bub!”). The two of them have to box. There’s no reason to it, there’s no reason for any of it. And yet, you also get the sense that Origins: Wolverine really does care. Why else have a fifteen minute origin story for Logan’s leather jacket? That strange zone between faithfulness and nihilism, between an auteur’s expression and a studio managing intellectual property brands, that’s where this movie lives. Executives were looking at a Will.I.Am John Wraith spinoff with dollar signs in their eyes. Instead, they got a gag in the credits of Deadpool 2.
And yet… and yet. What made Origins: Wolverine compelling still has a spark. The recent success of Venom speaks to that. There’s another movie where half the people involved seem to be going for broke, and the other are counting the residuals from their action figure sales. There’s a special Hollywood magic that happens in that space between art and commerce, where everyone involved thins they are making a different movie. It’s the space that gives us adamantium bullets (weirdly brilliant) and a Deadpool who doesn’t have a mouth (what were they thinking?).
So is X-Men Origins: Wolverine a good movie? Definitely not, but I’d take a dozen fascinating failures like it over a cookie-cutter mild success any day.
