AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-choo!
PG-13
Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston
Stryker: The warden tells me that your sentence was carried out by a firing squad at ten hundred hours. How did that go?
Wolverine: It tickled.
Wolverine (Jackman) and his brother, Victor (Schreiber), fight side by side for many many years, but when they’re recruited to a special forces team that kills innocent people indiscriminately, Wolverine won’t be a part of it and leaves. Years later, Wolverine is working as a lumberjack and is happily involved with a woman, Kayla (Lynn Collins), but the head of the special forces team, William Stryker (Huston) drags him back into his bizarre experiments with mutants.
I thought the overall story arc of this movie wasn’t that bad, but it lost me in the details. The characters are dull, there are many scenes lifted straight out of a dozen other similar movies, the dialogue is boring and recycled, and some of the special effects seemed sort of sub-par. It all added up to one big unmemorable experience.
I kind of liked the relative mystery behind the Wolverine story that we got in the X-Men movies. It was far more interesting to only get glimpses of his troubled past rather than having it spelled out in a bunch of cliched scenes. How many times have we seen a heart rate monitor go flat line, everybody look disappointed, then suddenly: beep. Wow, he made it! So the hero of the movie didn’t die in the first half hour…what a surprise.
Is it so hard to be original? Can’t a writer or director look at a scene and realize that it’s standard, boring dialogue and character development that has been done 1,000 times? Or is that exactly what the studios want? They actually want yet another scene of the hero walking away from a crashed vehicle as though he’s going to let the survivors stuck inside live, only to light a trail of gasoline that burns up to the vehicle and causes it to explode in the background as the hero walks triumphantly away? ‘Cause yeah, that’s been done before.
Anyway, the movie is average. Things blow up, Wolverine slices up people and objects with his adamantium claws, and we see several other X-People with various far more interesting abilities. Maybe the next origins movie about one of those characters will be more interesting than this one.
William Stryker does not think through his plans very carefully. In fact, he seems like kind of an idiot.
10 – 4 for boring, unoriginality – .1 for some blah special effects – .3 for dull characters = 5.6
The Robot Who Likes Pretty Things 
I think I liked this about as much as you did…. I don’t know if the other characters are more interesting or not…. there were so many with plain first names, it was hard to keep track of who was who…. especially when ‘Victor’ was going around killing mutants on the sly and people would have intense conversations about who he had killed and I was just sitting there trying to remember who was who from the one scene we got from everyone together in Africa… and what was with the fat boxer guy? That just seemed silly…. in all, not terrible, but not great either…. about on par with the third X-men movie or so…