Special Effects, Naked Chests

Most professional critics have given low grades to X-Men Origins:
Wolverine. They claim their bad reviews are due to the clumsy
script, the derivative directing and the film’s low interest in being
intelligent.

I think, rather, that the reason X-Men Origins: Wolverine has
gotten such bad reviews is that reviewers do not understand something
that film lovers like to call “awesomeness.”

First of all, in case you couldn’t decipher it from the title, this
movie is about Wolverine, who is awesome. Also—again for those
with limited literacy skills—it’s totally about the origin of
Wolverine, including when he was born, how many wars he kicked ass in,
and when he got all that metal inside of him so that his awesome went
from “awesome?” to “awesome!”

I should, in the interest of full disclosure, note that I used to
work at Marvel Comics, and that I’ve seen Chris Claremont cry. So
perhaps I’m too well-educated in things Wolverine to fall for the
pedestrian views of mainstream movie critics who’ve seen every Ingmar
Bergman film but have never known love or the outcome of the last
Avengers/Justice League crossover. But if you’re willing to accept that
having a character look at the sky and scream is just as good as
intelligent dialogue, then I think you may be open-minded enough to
love Wolverine.

Because it’s fun stupid action at high speed, with nicely realized
special effects. I was recently talking to a comics professional about
why comic-book movies were always so campy in the distant past (say,
pre-Spider-Man), and we decided it was because the special
effects weren’t able to make the super-powered fights look good. No
such problem exists now, and when Wolverine battles a teleporting,
eye-beam-blasting, sword-wielding zombie monster, you’ll believe.

Plus—and I was reminded of this repeatedly by my friend
Genevieve as she sat hyperventilating in the seat next to me—Hugh
Jackman’s naked chest needs no special effects. And it shows up
frequently in this film. In fact, there’s one action/fight sequence in
which Jackman is completely nude. You’d see his wolverpenis if it
hadn’t been digitally blurred out.

So it’s a film for the ladies and the gents. Jackman, of course,
plays Wolverine, a mutant born in the mid-19th century whose
super-healing power has kept him alive in spite of repeated bullets to
the chest and some chlamydia. His brother Victor is also a mutant,
code-named Sabretooth. Victor has the same healing powers, but he is
taller and not as pretty. Liev Schreiber, who’s known for his work in
Shakespearean theater, really lights up the Sabretooth character. It’s
odd that more Shakespearean actors haven’t played superheroes; other
than Patrick Stewart as Professor X in the X-Men movies and Sir
Laurence Olivier as Catwoman in Catwoman, the job of
super-acting has been left in the hands of song-and-dance men,
comedians and sitcom extras.

Not that Wolverine is lacking in those: Ryan Reynolds goofs
it up as super-mercenary Wade Wilson, and will.i.am. does a surprisingly good job as
teleporting mutant John Wraith. There’s also some smart casting in
dragging Taylor Kitsch out of Friday Night Lights to play
Southern-powered mutant Gambit, and former hobbit Dominic Monaghan does
an affecting job as Bolt, master of electricity.

But the real star of the film is the special-effects system. While
the story serves the purpose of setting up the fight scenes, it’s the
fights that win out over the story. The film follows Wolverine from his
birth in Canada, then montages him through four wars in order to bring
him to Lagos, Nigeria, where the Army is using mutants as a sort of
evil, government-sponsored A-team.

Fed up with acting as an assassin for people who make Dick Cheney
seem like Florence Nightingale (there’s actually a toss-off line later
in the film, in a sort of Bagram-esque prison, in which the evil
government agent talks up the merits of the Bush doctrine of
pre-emptive war), Wolverine goes solo and finds a nice backwoods lady
to settle down with. She’s all pretty and works with children and makes
flowers jealous, so the government sends bad people to hurt her, and
then lots of stuff gets sliced up by adamantium claws—stuff like
helicopters and nuclear cooling towers and, if you don’t hold on to it
tight, your suspension of disbelief.

But you should hold on, and see Wolverine in a theater full
of excitable people, because that helps its ass-kickingness. Yeah, it’s
not exactly My Dinner With Andre (though there is a cunning
visual reference to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which I think
is a first for a superhero movie), but so what? And, yes, the directing
is occasionally cheesy; there are too many scenes with overhead shots
of Wolverine holding a dead body and screaming into the sky; and I
don’t think anyone is going to give it an Oscar for Best Screenplay
(though, strangely, one of Wolverine‘s writers also wrote the
screenplay for The Kite Runner). But, then, not many
Oscar-winning movies made $160 million in global box office on their
opening weekend.

So it’s up to you: You can stay home and read Proust, or you can go
watch mutants fight helicopters. But remember: When you’re on your
deathbed, you’re not going to be wishing you’d spent more time reading
Proust.

This article appears in May 7-13, 2009.