Instead of just watching X-Men: Origins: Wolverine (my goodness, what idiot thought that mashed potato filled title was a good idea?) like I intended, I ended up watching all three of the Wolverine movies. They are:
(all titles above link to the Wikipedia pages. I’m not going to waste time putting up synopses for these) I am glad to have gotten them all out of the way. After Logan, I was left gnashing my teeth, almost foaming at the mouth and fully decided to watch no more X-Men movies.
Origins, as the title declares, is the origin story of Wolverine. It’s not canon, it’s not even inline with the previous X-Men films, but I enjoyed this a lot. It was a comic book super hero movie and it leaned into that unabashedly. From stupid, face-palming one liners to scenarios so outrageous that your brain has to stop, this was fun from top to bottom.
The Wolverine was a bit darker, had Famke Jannsen as Jean Grey haunting Wolverine’s mind and ended up with a battle between Wolverine and a giant Mecha made out of adamantium. That Wolverine destroys with a heated adamantium super sword. Yakuza, kidnappings, corruption, like I said, darker. But at the same time, it felt like it was trying to be more serious than Origins but it was just as comic book’y. But it was trying to play it straight. It almost worked, but whereas I found myself just accepting stuff in Origins, for this movie I kept thinking “That’s stupid. That doesn’t make sense. How would that EVEN work?” Those are not questions I should be asking if I want to enjoy a movie.
Then we come to Logan. An old Wolverine is taking care of an insane and incontinent Professor X and there’s some new breed of Mutant X warriors, blah, blah, blah. This was rated R (where the previous two were pg-13) and boy did they run with that rating. Logan AND Professor X swear worse than sailors, the hopelessness of everything just oozes off the screen and in a move that I found rather despicable, Logan spends five minutes screaming at the little girl (X23?) about how comic books are lies and not real and should be ignored. That is when I decided to mentally check out. Comic books have never claimed to be real or “like the real world”. The whole flipping point is to give some kids an escape for a couple of minutes and to show them something good. There is a reason they used to be about Super HEROES, and not just about super powered individuals. Hope, comic books offered hope to kids in a form they could understand. And this movie took that hope, mind raped it, gouged its eyeballs out, cut its legs off and then sat back and smugly said “So, where is your hope now, puny human?” I was sickened, disgusted and totally put off by the message.
So I’m done with the X-Franchise. To be perfectly honest, Logan affected me enough that I’m considering not reviewing another movie until after new years.
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