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| Edited By: Johnson Thomas |Source: DNA |Updated: Nov 19, 2013, 11:17 PM IST
X-Men origins: Wolverine
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber
Director: Gavin Hood
Rating: ** 1/2
Wolverine is a back story that fills up the cinematic gaps left unexplained in the previous ‘X-Men’ films based on the popular marvel comics band of mutants. Unfortunately it’s not half as exciting or entertaining as the earlier ones. David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script tries to show us reasoning for the moniker ‘Wolverine’, his loss of memory and gain of adamantum claws but it all appears flimsy.
Gavin Hood prefers to tell the story by jumping from event to event without developing the links. The film begins in Canada’s northwest territory, 1845, where a young James/Logan/Wolverine finds out that he has an older half-brother Victor/Sabretooth.
They fight in the Civil War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam. Col William Stryker (Danny Huston) then comes into the picture to take them on as a part of his special team of mutants. James quits and regains some semblance of normality as Logan, living an idyllic life as a lumberjack in the Canadian Rockies with his lady love, schoolteacher Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins).
New characters keep jumping in and out of the frame at random intervals. There is no proper development happening in the story. None of the characters are fleshed out definitively.
Even those of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and his half-brother Sabretooth (Liev Schrieber) appear caricaturish and one-dimensional. Wolverine is constantly in a god-awful rage for most of the movie and the reasons vary while Sabretooth appears angrier and you just don’t know why.
The two are programmed to be eternally at war with each other. The plotlines are basically segmented into different action sequences. Even the romantic subplot ends up being a reason for revenge.
Jackman and Schrieber are competent but their performances don’t add another dimension to the film. The special effects don’t appear to be ‘special’ enough. This film is typical of the comic book cinema genre, it is stuck in caricature groove and doesn’t aim for more!
