Theatre Release – July 1, 2009
Director – Michael Mann
Starring – Johnny Depp, Christian Bale
Feds try to bring down America's most notorious criminal John Dillinger at the height of the crime wave that hit in the 1930s'
Public Enemies – Trailer 2
You have to feel a little sorry for all the people who worked on X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Partly because of its awful, wooden title. But mainly because they’ve been sweating and labouring for months if not years on a film that, as far as millions of people across the world are concerned, is merely a big-screen version of the feature they’ve already been watching on their laptops over the last few weeks.
Is it good though? That’s the question studio execs should really be worried about. Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) didn’t exactly set a high quality bar. None the less Wolverine is an artificial stimulus package of the most unsatisfying kind. Aggressively advertised and hyped to the hills, it will no doubt attract full houses at first; after that though, when word-of-mouth buzz-kill goes into overdrive, there’s bound to be widespread deflation and a palpable feeling of being conned.
The film begins in 1840s Canada, when a young James Logan (aka Wolverine) and his half-brother Victor Creed (aka Sabretooth) discover that their future paths are inextricably connected. Cue the film’s best sequence: a gallop through key military conflicts — the American Civil War, Dunkirk , the Vietnam War – until the pair of them are shown trussed before a firing squad and awaiting execution.
They’re saved by General Stryker (Danny Huston), a genial war-man who recruits them for a covert-ops unit called Team X. They end up in Nigeria in pursuit of a mysterious rock-like material for which they’re meant to be willing to destroy anyone, innocent or guilty, who gets in their way. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) refuses and retires to the Canadian Rockies where he lives in bliss with his girlfriend Kayla (Lynn Collins). Inevitably, along comes Sabretooth spoiling for blood. The rest is mayhem.
The rest is also tedium. Hugh Jackman is fine enough, a slice of prime beefcake who’s able to take out hordes of on-rushing enemies but also gives the impression that he’d be as happy changing baby nappies. It’s a good, multi-demographic-appeasing combination.
The trouble is that the film clearly aspires to be a dark, brooding origin story in the style of Batman Begins (2005). Wolverine is meant to loathe his extraordinary strength: “You’re not an animal,” Kayla urges him. But he doesn’t seem especially revolted with his powers so much as indifferent to them. There’s no genuine tension or visceral anguish to dramatise this supposed conflict within him.
Schrieber, who never quite convinces in the sober, preppy roles he usually plays, is jolly enough to watch as he grimaces and growls. Collins, an ethnically indeterminate cross between Carla Bruni and Jessica Biel, is pretty compelling. But neither these two, nor any of the other actors – Dominic Monaghan as electricity-generating Bradley or Taylor Kitsch as floppy-haired Remy LeBeau who can manipulate any material into a weapon – get enough killer scenes.
In fact, the screenplay by David Benioff and Skip Woods is an arhythmic mess, full of holes and elisions so that, even on the lowest-common-denominator basis of helicopter chases and acts of decapitation, the film doesn’t have anything like the power it should.
It’s been claimed director Gavin Hood (2005’s Tsotsi), who saw the story as an exercise in post-traumatic-stress psychology, suffered the indignity of having Richard Donner of Superman fame brought on to make the final product more “kick ass” and blast-intensive. It ends up a compromise, a ghastly hybrid, a film that appears to have pirated and wrecked its own potential.
By Sukhdev Sandhu
3rd May, 2009
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