There's A Naked Man In Our Barn

SPOILERS

I went with Ben yesterday to see Wolverine: X-Men Origins, or whatever it's called. It was utterly lifeless. Hugh Jackman is always a treat, but here he's disserviced by a script that has him tricked into getting an operation that makes him indestructible, because - follow with me now - he wouldn't otherwise volunteer for it. So his boss makes his brother kill his girlfriend so he'll volunteer, but he didn't really kill her because she was playing him the whole time to get him to volunteer. And his brother, who is killing everyone else, didn't kill the girlfriend of his baby brother who he loves and protects because... why?

The direction is very poor. Gavin Hood never really knows where to put the camera, unless it's ten feet over Jackman's head so he can scream when someone's dead. Also, why is it that no one knows how to film a car chase anymore? The helicopter/bike thing you've seen in the previews is okay, except most of it is filmed in front of a green screen (watch Death Proof to see that is still possible to film a car chase practically). The green screen is really distracting, because the effects are equally poor - the CGI in these X-Men movies never seems to be on par with other big movies, and this one is particularly bad. The final sequence on top of a nuclear reactor (yeah) seems like it came from a video game about ten years ago. The rendering on most everything (including a wonky cameo by Patrick Stewart) looks cheap. That five different effects houses - none of them ILM - contributed to this movie seems to say everything. The fight scenes are weak. Wolverine spends a lot of time screaming. They completely shaft Deadpool, and Gambit, the only bright spot in the movie, is hardly there.

Moving on.