X-Men Bore-igins: Shit-latrine

 

If you decide to see Wolverine, get ready for a lot more sky-yelling.

     You know, nothing’s worse than having to really tear someone down that you respect and genuinely like. Actually, I mean, I guess there’s probably plenty of things that are worse. I’m pretty sure losing a loved one is probably worse. Rape is pretty terrible. Swine flu? No picnic. But I digress. It sucks to have to be so negative (and snarky) when you’re really just disappointed with the efforts of someone who you typically think is pretty tits. Now imagine that you’re in a room full of people who you genuinely like, and expect a lot from, and when it comes time to impress your other friends with their charming conversation skills, none of them can manage more than a “Rectum… DAMN NEAR KILLED ‘EM” joke, or calling someone a retard and hitting their chest with their hand. I mean, it’s enough to make you want to shed a tear, scrunch your face up, and yell at the sky in frustration. Well, that’s how I felt after watching this new Wolverine movie, and I wasn’t the only one. But on the bright side, if this is also your reaction, be secure in the knowledge that in this you will not be alone… Because Hugh Jackman can scream at enough sky for all of us. Apparently, it’s his mutant power.

     So, brass tacks, right? Is it better than X3: The Ratt Stand? Well, you bring up an interesting point, but shut up, because I’m getting there. The bottom line is that I’m not really sure. As frustrating, stupid, juvenile, insulting, poorly edited, poorly rendered, ham-fisted, dialogue-massacring, and fucktarded as this film is, I kept seeing this much better movie trying to get out. Unfortunately, the movie trying to escape this one’s clutches still suffered from being based on a script that was nowhere near ready to shoot, and likely was covered in Fox executive spooge when it was rushed into production. And yes, I am going right for the “it’s the executives’ fault” argument, because it’s Fox, and a part of me refuses to believe that the director and actors involved, especially those who were also PRODUCERS, set out to make such a focus-grouped and lowest-common-denominator affair as this. What really irks me is that for five, ten minutes at a time, the movie will start to do something right. And then as soon as you start to feel like it could turn around, it feels like you can almost see a dude in a suit with no soul literally pause the movie and say to the director/actors,

“OK, this is working. But is there any way we could work in a quote from Rambo? I think the 25-40 year olds will eat it up. And while you’re at it, throw in about 8-10 more mutants.”

 

"Yeah! But needs 20% more muscular doods yelling at the sky..."

     It’s so frustrating to be talked down to by a goddamn summer movie, to the point where plot elements and twists really don’t mean shit anymore, because everything is just spelled out boringly with trite witticisms or brain-dead expositional moments. I feel like I need to interrupt the screen to tell the movie that it’s ok, I don’t need the extra big text and the pop up cues to understand that, yes, they tricked the bastard. A bigger problem is that while almost every actor on screen is really going for it and working at finding a way to make this exercise worth your time, there’s no underlying reason for any of this to affect you. The dialogue isn’t engaging, so that’s out. Character interactions are matter of fact, and while they show you plenty of characters doing plenty of things, it never feels like there’s a genuine reason for any of them to do anything. Everything is either explained away with some piece of information that specifically exists to explain it, or you’re expected to know it because you already know the story. Yeah, that’s not why I paid the theater money to see Wolverine’s hackneyed backstory. If I wanted some hack just talking it out to me, I’d go hang out with some pimply dude with Magic cards and extra time on his hands.

     To sum it up, everything that happens seems to do so simply because it’s either expedient, or is what formula dictates should happen next. Why does Wolverine rescue a bunch of kids? Or Sabretooth kill an old teammate? Because that’s what the formula says happens next, dimwit. It’s all so empty that I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how hollowly everyone reacts to the events taking place around them. The first time a character yelled at the sky (within the first five minutes, mind you) over the event that preceded said sky yelling, I fought the urge to think, “oh, it’s one of those movies”. And then amazingly, some genuinely good and interesting things started to take place on screen to help me get over the sky-yelling, but then characters would do and say stupid and lame things, or appear and disappear for no reason, and then by the time James “Wolverine” (explained by his poorly acted lady friend) Logan screamed at the sky for a second time, I had already laughed openly with my friends at several “serious” moments, and it was clear, before the third instance of heavens-bellowing had even occurred, that it was all devolving steadily into an action figure-on-action figure extravaganza that planned on ditching cohesion and reason as soon as humanly possible. Double crosses and redemptive actions come and go with such regularity in the third act that not only do you not know who’s side anyone is really on, but damned if you could pull it together enough to even give a shit. Once character’s reason for being a double-crossing enemy becomes the reason for 20 unnecessary cameos and another illogical action scene. I guess the problem is that, yes, there are exciting things happening. But with no semblence of story telling or weight it all just comes off as boring and trite, and one would really expect more from this creative team, especially the actors. To paraphrase Idiocracy, there was a time when people cared whose sky-yell it was, and why they were yelling.

     Which brings me to the good parts! Which will actually take me back to the depressing things, but still. Nearly every actor in the movie is really trying their best with extremely shitty pacing and story working against them. Liev Schreiber really stands out here as someone doing his best to avoid drowning in a sea of shitty lines. He’s actually just about totally fantastic in this movie, giving his all to portray a sense of sadism and wounded pride that isn’t given even a line to build on. It’s all just Schreiber, swinging for the fences and giving a really dark and kind of funny performance that the movie almost doesn’t really deserve. And believe me, he comes off the best. Many actors one could say were better than Liev Schreiber don’t fare half as well with more breaks than he gets. Danny Huston does his best, but you can tell he struggles with essentially being a goddamn plot device. He tries to give a bit of humanity to Stryker, who is written as your standard villain, but he just can’t seem to make the lines work for him the way that Liev does. Dominic Monaghan shows up as one of the most wasted assets of the film. A character with about three lines whom he injects with as much humanity and melancholy as you can when you’re given about three lines, none of them worth shit, story-wise. In order from best to least, Ryan Reynolds, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston, Daniel Henney, Will.I.Am, and dumbass Taylor Kitsch (based on watching him in an interview), then everyone else, everyone mostly does a pretty good job. Actually, better than pretty good, when you consider that they have to find a way to act around the movie’s singular motivation: if you can’t have a logical reason to fight this guy, or shoot these people, or break this sink, just make that shit up. As long as you blow something up when you enter and exit, you’re good! Hugh Jackman is basically as steady as always, but looks as if he wasn’t really given any direction and didn’t perform for alternate takes, just coasting on his own charisma to carry him through tepid emotional melodrama. It all leads me to believe that poor Gavin Hood set out to make one movie, continued trying to MAKE that movie, and was finally and embarrassingly made aware by the studio that he was expected only to nod and jump when asked, and keep the clichéd, puerile beats intact for the movie masses.

     If you believe the rumors, Gavin Hood and team had pretty much constant interference on their hands from the folks at Fox. Personally, after the way Fox treated Bryan Singer on the first X-Men movie and prior to the third movie, I believe every bit of it. There’s a reason Fox Is universally reviled by creative teams, and it ain’t just cause they ruin awesome franchises by consistently dumbing them down to the point of the surreal… Actually… that’s a pretty big part of why. Just figure that if you’re a director and you’re ever handed the fourth movie in a Fox-owned franchise, you should probably get used to the taste of studio dick. Alien V. Predator movies aren’t getting any better, and I’m even willing to only count them as two of one series on my generous days, instead of the efficient and brutal bleating death of two once great franchises. People who haven’t seen Wolverine usually seem to ask people who have, “how was Gambit?”, or, “Was the Weapon X stuff cool?”, or even, “C’mon, how bad was Deadpool really? He can’t be that bad”. And the answer is not easy to give, because the answer is simply that it doesn’t matter. In throwing ever approach possible at the wall and hopin it stuck, it just made everything tedious and boring. It doesn’t matter if Gambit is cool, because he’s not in the fucking movie for any reason at all. It doesn’t matter how bad they fucked up Deadpool, because in silencing Ryan Reynolds by taking his mouth and free will, and then turning him into a big super-villain macguffin, he’s no longer really a character after he becomes Deadpool. He’s just a reason for stupid shit to happen, like adamantium bullets, and 20 different caged mutants on screen at one time. It’s actually kind of amazing that everyone didn’t just know who Wolverine was immediately in the first film, considering that so many prominent mutants were rescued by him at one time, so you’d imagine gossip might have reached at least Professor X, and beyond that one of the X-Men was ACTUALLY FUCKING THERE! Oh, but he had a blindfold on… right. And Quicksilver is easily outmatched by rubber bands and a metal cage… Oh right, they show that… for no reason.

     So, Is it better than X3? Well, as my friend Jeff put it, “a cry is equal to two sky-yells” so technically speaking you’d have to give it to Wolvie. But, and I never thought I’d say this, at least X3 tried to hold some semblence of story, or drama, or meaning for scenes and characters to exist. I’m going to say that X3 and Wolverine are equal, with one of them winning over the other alternately every time I think about it.  Any way, We’ve started Movie May by posting yet another TL;DR essay bitch-fest, so I’m simply going to leave this at the statement that I’m glad I saw this first, because now Star Trek and Terminator are going to be even better than they already would have been. PEACE OUT!

 

 

P.S. If you want to just throw as many mutants as possible at me, at least give me Havok. Shit, ALPHA FLIGHT would have been ok. At least it’s better than a bunch of lame nods to the comics they obviously didn’t care about.