X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Movie Review (2009)

Directed by Gavin Hood, written by David Benioff and Skip Woods, 108 minutes, rated PG-13.

The new Hugh Jackman movie, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” stars every bit of Hugh Jackman.
This includes his aggressive sideburns, his bared chest and abs, his blowout fright wig and excitable claws, a well-gnawed cigar that would cause Freud to raise a knowing eyebrow, and jeans that are so tight, they could set fire to a brothel.

And likely have.

These are the co-stars in a movie whose advertising campaign went to the wall to fetishize all of them, so it’s fair to consider them as vital players in a film that presumably also is about the backstory of how Wolverine became Wolverine in the three previous “X-Men” movies.

From David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script, Gavin Hood directs without taking a breath, and his game cast is eager to play along. Given the way the film was sold to the masses--Wolverine as savior, Wolverine as hirsute sex symbol--nobody should come to it expecting anything on par with what Christopher Nolan created in his deeper, more intriguing “Batman Begins,” which also is an origins movie.

“Wolverine” has zip for depth, but since it never sold itself as such, who cares? This is the action movie the advertising campaign promised, and Hood comes through with plenty of scenes that satisfy on a visceral level.

Since few will champion “Wolverine” as a cleanly told film--it’s a hot mess straight through to the end--let’s just cut through the clutter and get to the essentials.

The movie’s core story is about Wolverine’s crumbling relationship with his older brother, Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber), a fellow mutant whose darker side doesn’t mesh with Wolverine’s more heroic tendencies. When Sabretooth goes too far in the bloodletting department (he’s a beast, killing for the sake of killing), the two separate--and not on good terms.

The ugliness that brews between them sets the movie up for its second half, in which love hovers along the periphery when Wolverine falls hard for Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins), a hottie hippie mellowing out in the Canadian Rockies, and then when Wolverine joins Col. Stryker (Danny Huston) in becoming part of an experiment that turns his skeleton (and other parts of him) into steel.

There are critical reasons why Wolverine agrees to the experiment, but without giving too much away, let’s leave it at this--mutant friends of Wolverine are being murdered. Others are being rounded up and sent to a facility at Three Mile Island, where scientists are picking over their bones and studying them. When all hell breaks loose, as it has to, Wolverine vows to destroy a key character, he must battle his bitter brother, and he also must fend off a monster who has the destructive powers of 11 mutants.

A good deal of it this fun even if it is familiar, with Hood tipping the super-hero movie on its side as if it were one mega bucket of popcorn. Yes, a few undercooked kernels spill out, and they’re hard to swallow, but the film’s saltiness still has bite.

What “Wolverine” ultimately achieves is what movies always have done better than any other medium--it takes one person, in this case Hugh Jackman, and turns him into something otherworldly. Like Grant, Brando, Monroe, Turner, Harlow and Hayworth before him, the sum of his parts make for an unobtainable whole. The film elevates him into a fantasy figure, which, in case some have forgotten in this new era of movies, is what real movie stars are about.

Grade: B-

View the trailer for "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" here: