Sunday, May 3, 2009

Snickety-Snickt

Some thoughts on that one movie that opened this weekend. I'll try to avoid explicit spoilers, but some stuff will be obliquely spoilerish, so bail if you don't want to know that Logan was born outside ancient Rome and raised by wolves. Spoilerish bullet points after the picture...

Where the hell are my royalties!!
  • When, exactly, was a law passed requiring Ryan Reynolds to be in every single movie? Because that's the only possible explanation...
  • An elevator music joke? Really? This is 2009, guys...
  • "The island"--clever. That also explain a lot...
  • The problem with a prequel is that you really restrict your options if you're not careful. Case in point, since we KNOW that the villains in this movie survive to appear in the X-Men movies, we know they can't die. So goodbye, dramatic tension.
  • There's a difference between "complex" and "who cares why, just have the characters do this." Some characters change sides in this movie more times than I can count; some characters launch into fights with other characters for no apparent reason, and in fact against common sense; a real deus ex machina shows up at the end, and there's really no reason or explanation for why that deus shows up, coincidentally, at the exact right moment and place.
  • The old cliche "I'd kill you, but than I'd be no better than you" speech would be a whole hell of a lot more impressive if the very next line weren't "Now I'm going to subject you to a hideous torture." Funny, they never mention where psychically raping someone places them on that particular moral scale...
  • Canadian, American, American, Canadian...why be so picky? It's all the same...
  • I can't decide--was it a good thing or a bad thing that Taylor Kitsch couldn't be bothered to do the accent for Gambit?
  • What about 1 through 9?
Overall, an odd film...oddly structured, oddly paced, not a goddamned brain in its head, but not terribly offensive, either. Not the worst vehicle for overpriced popcorn and soda. But not good in any way, either.

To those who thought that Iron Man and The Dark Knight raised the bar for superhero movie, Wolverine pretty much proves that not true.


3 comments:

Sea-of-Green said...

Or, it's proof that the super-hero movie has truly grown into its own genre, in that we can now expect really good ones in addition to the really bad. Just like computer animated feature films -- they can't ALL be as good as Pixar's. :_)

Anonymous said...

Just count your lucky stars that wolverine didn't appear in every single movie poster/trailer with a disclaimer that he doesn't show up in the actual movie. Although, a romantic comedy with Wolverine slicing up someone randomly in it with no explanation or tie-in with the plot might actually be hilarious, once.

Saidi of the 90's said...

Well at least the french call him Serval, which is a bit more dignified than the true translation for Wolverine...
OOkay here they are : Carcajou & Glouton.
Yep Wolvie would be cuter with these names don't you think?