This is a SPOILER FREE review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, however with that being said, there really isn’t much to spoil.  If you have seen the previous X-Men movies, seen the trailers, tv spots, and clips online, there really isn’t much more to the movie than what you’ve seen before.

The movie’s story and action are pretty much what you’ve seen already and you will be able to predict the rest, and while some of you will be ok with that, I wasn’t impressed.  If you liked X-Men 3:Last Stand, then you probably will be entertained with the action in this movie and seeing all the characters from the X-Men universe.

And there lies one of the major problems of the movie, like X-Men 3, it tries to pack as many characters into the storyline, you start to forget that it’s supposed to be Wolverine’s Origin story and think of it as more of a prequel to X-Men.  I think the writers either choose or were forced to write a screenplay that’s only purpose was to make sure that Logan/Wolverine meets up with all these characters along his way in order to make you feel like there’s so much going on and these characters are somehow vitally important.  But when you step back from it, you realize nothing much happened, and these characters have no depth to them, and are merely for show. Sometimes they seem to be there for no reason, or would pop up randomly just to show they existed. 

The inclusion of Cylops serves only as small payoff plot “twist” at the end (it’s really predictable).  It also doesn’t’ make any sense because in the first X-Men, Cyclops never talks about meeting Logan or Sabretooth before, which would never happen, except that it didn’t when they made the original X-Men movie. 

There are some cool fight scenes between Logan and SabreTooth, and also my favorite scenes were with Gambit.  But I did get sick of seeing Wolverine going into his rage mode, especially when they did that cheesy from the top view, that we parodied in the last MegasShow (http://www.thinkhero.com/2009/04/28/wolverine-movie-special-edition-megashow-5/)

We get it, you’re an angry guy Logan, can we please move on?

Also one of the better parts of the movie were with Ryan Reynolds character before becoming Deadpool (who by the way is a horrible looking character with unoriginal “powers” that we also parodied), unfortunately they didn’t have much of him pre-Deadpool, which is a shame.

VISUAL EFFECTS
One thing that was suprising, was the inconsistency in some of the visual effects shots in the Wolverine movie.  Certain shots in the movie, almost seemed unfinished.  Some of the green screen shots were very obvious, and certain gunfire and gun hits looked very digital on the big screen. One thing that really bothered me was Logan’s blades,  in a lot of the shots and scenes, you could feel the digital-ness of them, thus lessening the impact of some action shots.  It seems like the movie either ran out of time or money and needed more to finish these effects off to make them more believable.

Ultimately, if you weren’t bothered by X-Men 3, and Brett Ratner’s version of the X-Men Universe, you probably will enjoy Gavin Hood’s Wolverine Origins tale.  There’s some decent action, especially for me with the Gambit scenes, but the storyline is kind of a mess, and there are too many characters to even care when certain ones die off.  A lot of the plot and dialogue is cliche with nothing that will make you remember the movie.  There’s a few funny moments in the movie both intentional and unintentional.

For me, I’ll be waiting for Star Trek or Terminator Salvation to kick off my summer movie madness right.

Overall I gave X-Men Origins: Wolverine a:

 -  Dennis