The Wolverine Trilogy (Movie)

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:

• Origins (2009)
• The Wolverine (2013)
• Logan (2017)

(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.

X3: The Last Stand (2006 Movie)

The last of the original X-Men trilogy. Sadly, Brian Singer did not direct this, as he had gone on to do that horrible Superman Returns movie. So it is hard to judge if this movie was really as bad as it was because of him leaving or if it was just a bad movie all on its own.

While I didn’t hate it, it was a chore to watch the whole thing. The biggest problem was that whoever the writers were, they simply tried to pack in way too much into the one movie. You have a very poorly done Dark Phoenix arc (Jean Grey is the most powerful mutant EVAH but kept it under control with Professor X’s help and she goes bad), you have a story about Magneto declaring war on humanity and assembling a massive army of mutants, you have a “cure” for mutantism that causes schisms amongst mutankind, you have some of the major mutants being killed off and you have a whole new crop of Team X-Men and evil Mutants being introduced.

It was just too many story threads and instead of being woven seamlessly together, they were all raggedly cut off to make room for the other threads.

Then you have the characters. They do not act like how they did in the previous 2 movies. Especially Professor X. Instead of taking time to explain anything, to anyone, he just starts roaring about how he knows best and everybody needs to listen to him. Perfect example of a megalomaniac in fact, and he’s supposed to be the good guy. Rogue decides to get the vaccine so she can have a relationship with Iceman, who is in the midst of his own little triangle with Shadowcat, ie, Kitty Pryde.

It was messy, uncoordinated and not a well executed film. Not one I’ll ever be rewatching. I’d say it’s only for those who want to watch the entire X-Franchise instead of good films.

X2: X-Men United (2003 Movie)

The second X-Men movie, subtitled X-Men United, follows right in the footsteps of the first movie. This time around Senator Striker is manipulating mutants with the end goal of taking over Cerebro and using its powers to kill all the mutants in the world. Nice guy right? At the same time Wolverine is on the hunt for his past and lost memories. Plus, there are a lot of little rabbit trails that are like crack to comic book fans of the time.

In this movie, the human/mutant interaction is really ramped up, the looming war seemingly right on the horizon and the threat to mutantkind almost realized. We also get a bunch more mutants but each one has very little screen time and almost no character development. Nightcrawler is the perfect example. He’s brought on board to the X-team but beyond being blue and able to teleport, he’s nothing.

I think Wolverine’s storyline was more interesting than the main one about Striker trying to kill all the mutants. While the “kill all the mutants” might be interesting to a 14 year old, with the promise of world wide chaos, I liked the more personal touch here. Probably explains why I enjoyed Origins so much. This just extremely busy. It’s one of the reasons I am not a big fan of Team Superheroes. I like the focus to be on one person.

I think Singer does a good job here. Not an excellent job, but a good job. I enjoyed watching this again but unlike the first movie, I’m not sure I’ll ever bother re-watching. This is definitely a comic book movie but not in the bestest way the first movie was.

The twist at the end where Xavier is set to kill all regular humans instead of mutants was about as subtle as a baseball bat to the head. But whatever, it fit with the comic book motif perfectly.

On a weird note, the actor who plays Striker is the same man who plays Boris the Russian diplomat in the RED duology. Hearing him speak with a slight southern drawl was very disconcerting as I’m used to him being all “Dah, Comrade” and whatnot. It was one thing I could not get past.

Overall, this was a good fun re-watch on a Sunday afternoon but not one I’d unreservedly recommend.

X-Men (2000 Movie)

X-Men, directed by Brian Singer, was one of the first really well done Super Hero movies. The first Spiderman movie hadn’t come out yet, but neither had such flops like Ghostrider, Elektra or the Fantastic Four duology. A brand new cinematic world was opening up to us.

And it was glorious!

I was rather hesitant to re-watch this, as I had such good memories and did NOT want to sully them; Marvel has done that well enough on its own. But my goodness, I had so much FUN watching this.

It definitely helped that much of the storyline was familiar to me from the 90’s X-Men comics. But it was a comic book and it just reveled in it. I mean, Magneto has a massive mutant making machine already installed in the torch of the Statue of Liberty? Come on, that’s ridiculous. And it worked perfectly because it is exactly how badguys always operate in the comics. This was not a Zack Snyder grimfest or deconstructionist dystopia. Singer has a love of the goodguys kicking butt, overcoming great odds and looking good doing it 🙂 It also wasn’t 3hrs long. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

While I have enjoyed the Infinity War story arc that the MCU took us on, by the end I was ready for it to be done. I was ready for standalone movies with standalone stories. Kind of like this movie in fact. Which might explain just why I enjoyed it so much. While there are 2 sequels, this could easily be watched as a standalone. That really appeals to me.

So if you are a comic book fan and you want to watch a superhero film that is just plain fun and gives you a good time, watch X-Men.