X-Men Origins - Wolverine Reviews
Top Critic
You won't be upset you saw it, you'll have some fun, you'll see Wolvie beat the living hell out of a helicopter.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Did the plot points stick in my head five minutes after leaving the theater? Not so much ... but I know I was having fun while watching.
Wolverine's backstory was good stuff -- but after the falling out with Schreiber, the story loses its center and it gets wobbly.
Alas, there's nothing quite memorable here: much of the combat is just a whirl of movement photographed up close. As the X-Men series has progressed, the startling poetic extravagances of the first film have given way to flesh-pounding clumsiness.
How does all this play out for those of us -- i.e., me -- who have not been staying up nights fretting over the origins of the X-Men and Women? The answer is: Fairly well.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Those movies where people get sent to an island somewhere, then discover that everyone's a clone, or a reactor is melting down? Imagine all of that happening at once, only everybody is indestructible.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.9/10
If it's truly an 'Origins' tale, as advertised -- well, where are the explanations?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Summer's first tent-pole flick is a dulled outing. It may assuage the die-hard fan, but it's doggedly routine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Wolverine is supposedly a comic book movie, and yet it violates one of the tenets of comic books: It doesn't delineate and particularize Wolverine's special powers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Jackman's committed performance keeps the movie on track, though Huston and Schreiber are strictly on autopilot.
Wolverine doesn't rise above the level of familiar competence.
Though Jackman is capable, as always, in the title role, there's no real weight to his travails, which play more as exposition than tragedy.
With some dire blue-screen effects, dizzying tonal instability and a total absence of suspense or originality, 'Wolverine' is something of a disaster.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/6
In terms of tone and content, Wolverine is a nearer match to Daredevil than Iron Man, but its box office gross will undoubtedly be closer to the latter.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Heroes and villains clash, then rise up to clash again, just because that's what X-Men do. The truth is, it doesn't matter Y.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
The whole thing would collapse under the weight of its own pretensions were it not for the considerable acting prowess of Jackman and Schreiber, who know how to give good growl.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's little of the seen-it-all, wise-guy acerbity that made his character in the X-Men trilogy stand apart from his fellow mutants. Here, he just glowers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
If you're not a die-hard X-Men comic-book fan, you're going to be lost, and if you are a die-hard X-Men comic book fan, you're going to be disappointed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
A transparent attempt to squeeze a faltering franchise for its last drop of box-office juice.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The problem with Wolverine isn't that the mythology is detailed and potentially confusing. The bigger issue is that "Wolverine" is so uninvolving that you might not care whether you remember what happened 10 minutes ago.
Even by the standard of a fourth-in-a-series summer blockbuster, Wolverine is remarkably lame.
Whatever actually happened, the explosions all go off on time, which in a film like this is all that really matters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
A schlocky, dispiriting affair that kicks off the summer season in exhausted fashion, relies less on its overqualified cast (or even the outsider mythos of the comics) and more on fake-feeling computerized stunts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/6
The direction, by Gavin Hood is a case study in mismanagement: of anger, rage, demonic howls that grow into howlers, Olympian camera angles and, above all else, the mismanagement of an unusually personable star.
A crude blunderbuss of a superhero movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine proves that the greatest supervillains confronting Marvel Comics' shape-shifters, lycanthropes and mind-readers are clumsy directors and sloppy screenwriters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Wolverine is full of angst, and yet it has virtually all the humanity wrung out of it in an effort to create a live-action cartoon.
Perhaps this was the wrong X-Man to command an entire movie. Somebody find Jackman a role in which he gets to smile, and wake me up when Ian McKellen's back to terrorizing the X-world.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Jackman's charisma breathes the fire into Wolverine, not the rather pedestrian script or the by-the-numbers action.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with its ungainly, geeky title and its relatively trim running time, helps explain just what makes this guy so intriguing and unusual.
| Original Score: 2.5/5
A chaotic headbanger, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is saved from pure flat-footed blockbuster franchise adequacy by six things, three of them on Hugh Jackman's left hand, three on his right.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Wolverine feels enslaved to its many masters - Marvel Comics, Hollywood, and the young men who devour their products -- never sidestepping the déjà vu it inspires.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Most of the action is a mere replay of a single sequence: Wolverine and Sabretooth galloping toward one another, two immortal bros locked in eternal combat. Certainly feels like it.
I have been powerfully impressed by film versions of Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Iron Man and the Iron Giant. I wouldn't even walk across the street to meet Wolverine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Sadly, Wolverine's journey is one long run-the-gauntlet scenario, with people pounding on him from all sides until he emerges at the other end as the lone-wolf amnesiac bound for membership in the X-Men gang.
Jackman invests his fierce character with a cheeky attitude, clear-eyed intelligence and inherent decency, compelling viewers to care about his metamorphosis.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A super-buff Jackman gets to explore the character in more depth than previously and Liev Schreiber, as his brother, makes a dandy bad guy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
While packed with effects and action, without the attention to story and emotional investment present in such films as The Dark Knight and Ironman, Wolverine ultimately doesn't rise above its comic-book roots.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
A keen disappointment as action and effects take over from a poorly conceived story.
This brawny but none-too-brainy prequel sustains interest mainly -- if only fitfully -- as a nonstop slice-and-dice vehicle for Hugh Jackman.
