X-men Origins: Wolverine

To say that I was looking forward to the latest installment of the the X-men franchise, would be a gross understatement. Truth be told, Wolverine has been my most anticipated film for the last 2 years or so.

With great excitement and high expectations I went along to a screening, only to come out going 'hmmm....' Id say that's my own fault by having such high expectations, but hey I'm a geek, I'm allowed to right?

My biggest nuisance would probably boil down to the fact that I feel that too many stories have been crammed into one. One of the exciting things about the character Wolverine is that he has many different origin stories creating a very diverse character. I feel that the creators of this film should have maybe picked 1 or 2 lines from the smorgasbord to create a masterpiece, instead it seems they have picked many and tried to cram them all in to the first 30mins or so of the film. If they had chosen to focus on one closer I feel that they could have created an awesome film that would show a development of a character rather than an the array of awesome action effects that we got, causing the film to fall into the awkward middle ground between mindless action flick and a well rounded blockbuster film.

Strangely the film seems to be made for fanboys of the Marvel universe, as the film is made of characters from the universe, but almost no information is given on them. It seems that you need to be well educated in the characters to understand why they do the things they do and how (ie. powers and such) but at the same time, if you know a little about some characters it was easy to be let down. Where the hell was Remy's accent?

Now for some positive,

Liev Schreiber does a brilliant job as Victor, a man having great difficulty keeping the beast within. He growls his lines with ferocity and even at times out shines our hero.

Agent Zero played by Daniel Henney was an interesting character, with most of the best action sequences, when he met with his demise, the film actually felt to lack. Is it the revival of gun-fu?

The action sequences were awesomely gritty and brutal, when Wolvey says "I'm the best I am at what I do, and what I do isn't very nice" you believe him, and almost feel hes understating it.

The scene with all the young mutants in the prison, is interesting, I'm actually looking forward to watching it again and picking out who is who. But as someone has pointed out - In the finale, the mutants who will become the first generation of students for Xavier's School are freed by Wolverine. One might expect that the students to mention the grizzled, hairy rescuer with long metal claws in his hands, or that their psychic mentor might pick up on it. Cyclops is the only exception, as he was blind throughout that sequence. Yet when Wolverine reaches Xavier's School in the first X-Men movie, he is a complete mystery to everybody.

Also to be commended is Danny Huston as Stryker he fits the role perfectly.

In closing "Oooh, Shiny. "