Cast: Hugh Jackman (Logan/Wolverine), Liev Schreiber (Victor Creed), Danny Huston (Stryker), Will.i.am (John Wraith).
Director: Gavin Hood
In the crowded pantheon of comic-book-derived movie-franchise superheroes, Wolverine, as embodied by the muscular Australian song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman, always seemed kind of special. A grouchy, sensitive loner with retractable metal claws and apparently unretractable facial hair, Wolverine brooded and growled through the first three X-Men pictures, helping to supply them (or at least the first two) with welcome grace notes of rough humor and macho pathos. And now X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with its ungainly, geeky title helps explain just what makes this guy so intriguing and unusual. He’s Canadian.
This will not come as news to fans of the Marvel series. Still, Wolverine’s nationality does, in the present context, raise some puzzling questions. What is he doing fighting in the American Civil War? Why does he talk like a Queens longshoreman who spent his childhood summers in Indiana? Also, did you know he had a brother? Victor Creed, better known (though not in this movie) as Sabretooth, the venerable Marvel supervillain who at one point was thought to be Wolverine’s father, is actually his sibling. Go figure!
This will not come as news to fans of the Marvel series. Still, Wolverine’s nationality does, in the present context, raise some puzzling questions. What is he doing fighting in the American Civil War? Why does he talk like a Queens longshoreman who spent his childhood summers in Indiana? Also, did you know he had a brother? Victor Creed, better known (though not in this movie) as Sabretooth, the venerable Marvel supervillain who at one point was thought to be Wolverine’s father, is actually his sibling. Go figure!
So Wolverine, still known as James Logan, his claws still ordinary bone rather than high-tech adamantium, spends the credit sequence fighting in a bunch of wars alongside Victor. Victor’s claws sprout from his fingernails, rather than emerging from between his knuckle.
The explosions and landscapes have a bit more eye appeal, but even the showstopping visual flights (including a climactic battle at Three Mile Island and a brawl on the streets of New Orleans) have a rushed, rote feel about them. What’s worse, the outsize emotions that give any decent superhero epic its adolescent, pop-operatic gravity are diminished by the sheer hectic confusion of the storytelling.
The explosions and landscapes have a bit more eye appeal, but even the showstopping visual flights (including a climactic battle at Three Mile Island and a brawl on the streets of New Orleans) have a rushed, rote feel about them. What’s worse, the outsize emotions that give any decent superhero epic its adolescent, pop-operatic gravity are diminished by the sheer hectic confusion of the storytelling.
The movie will most likely manage to cash in on the popularity of the earlier episodes, but it is the latest evidence that the superhero movie is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue. A twist at the end that gives poor Wolverine a bad case of amnesia is a virtual admission that nothing terribly interesting has been learned about the character. He forgets his origins before the movie devoted to their exposition is even over. It won’t take you much longer.
Source : Deccan Chronicle
0 comments:
Post a Comment