DVD review: "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine" was doomed before they even started filming.

Not because audiences didn't want to see a spin-off about most popular character from the "X-Men" movies. Comic book fans were hungry for a story on the further adventures of the wayward mutant hero with metal claws and a healing ability that makes him unkillable -- preferably one they're already familiar with from the character's long history. (Japan, anyone?)

Instead, director Gavin Hood and his team delve into the character's origin story, which turns out to be one long Cain and Abel saga in which Wolverine and his similarly clawed brother Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber) play out their sibling rivalry in a seemingly endless series of stabby tussles.

Face it: Wolverine was more intriguing as a mystery man. The minute they tried to burden him with a past, he diminished as a character.

The DVD comes with a good set of extras, including two separate feature commentaries, one by Hood and the other by producers Brian Winter and Lauren Shuler Donner. Each are entertaining without covering much new ground.

Wolverine's comic book creators, Stan Lee and Len Wein, trade amusing banter in a 16-minute featurette in which Lee reveals that he considered the X-Men the runt of his litter of other comic titles such as "Thor" and "The Fantastic Four."

In "Wolverine Unleashed," a 12-minute making-of doc, star Hugh Jackman says his disturbingly veiny physique -- which he spent months sculpting with a special diet and training regimen -- was intended to make the character appear "freaky." "I wanted it to look animal," he says.

There are also four deleted/alternate scenes, including a variation on a critical scene leading up to the final showdown with Victor, in which Wolverine agrees to have his memories erased.

While straining credulity, this explanation for his memory loss is superior to the laughable moment in the final film, in which Wolverine is shot in the head with bullets made from the same indestructible metal in his skeleton. At least they weren't silver.

Movie: 2 stars
Extras: 3.5 stars

Review: "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"

Wolverine's spin-off is a cut below the other "X-Men" movies.

Packed with loads of claw-whirling mayhem but not a whole lot of soul, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" manages to take the most mysterious and popular member of the team of mutant super-heroes and turn him into a patsy with a Cain and Abel complex.

That is, if those Biblical brothers both had freaky long claws and the ability to instantaneously heal from virtually any wound. That's the familial legacy of Wolverine/Logan (Hugh Jackman, looking very veiny) and his brother Victor Creed, otherwise known as Sabretooth, and played by Liev Schreiber.

There's a load of bad blood between them -- and splurted on them -- with the basic conflict being that Wolverine wants to keep his animal instincts in check, while Sabretooth believes in letting his feral flag fly.

Complicating matters further, Sabretooth was a character in the first X-Men movie, in which he was played by another actor and looked completely different, and also didn't see fit to mention anything to Wolverine about being siblings. But continuity is not a big priority when summer box office records are in the offing.

The story opens back in 1845 (both Wolverine and Sabretooth's mutant powers slow the aging process), when Logan was a sickly boy. His powers first manifest during a terrible family argument in which several people are killed, and Logan and Victor flee as outcasts.

A montage shows the pair fighting together in virtually every American war from the North vs. South to Vietnam. Sabretooth's killer instincts grow even more out of control when they join a secret team of mutant super-soldiers led by Col. Stryker (Danny Huston). After some civilians are messily caught in the crossfire, Wolverine walks off to live the quiet life lumberjacking in the Canadian Rockies with a lady friend (Lynn Collins).

But old troubles return when Sabretooth starts hunting down the old team members, and a predictable tragedy leads Wolverine to strike a bargain with the human devil Stryker to obtain the tools to defeat his evil brother. He agrees to undergo an experimental process to bond an unbreakable metal called adamantium to his bones.

The rest of the movie is a confusing gumbo of double-crosses and MacGuffins, with Wolverine and Sabretooth tangling in a blur of claws every 20 minutes or so. A few other characters from the X-Men universe crop up, notably the Creole mutant Gambit as a potential ally.

The action scenes are well-executed by director Gavin Hood ("Tsotsi"), but this movie's problems began before the first foot of film was shot. Since the final events in "Wolverine" take place about 20 years prior to those in the first "X-Men" flick, screenwriters David Benioff and Skip Woods have to perform some major contortions to get things to sync up. In one laughable moment, Stryker produces a gun loaded with adamantium bullets he intends to use on the wayward Wolverine to induce amnesia. The final showdown also takes place in a very famous spot, with some architectural rearrangement that surely would not have gone unnoticed.

Some mysteries are better left unplumbed, and sometimes characters are most compelling because of what we don't know about them. They should have left "Wolverine" well enough alone.

2 stars out of four

Indy critics getting the middle claw from "Wolverine"

Last fall, I was sitting in the elegant bar of Indianapolis' Canterbury Hotel chatting with Ralph Winter. He's a big-wheel producer, about as big as they come in Hollywood, having produced the X-men, Fantastic Four and part of the Stark Trek franchises. He was here to speak at the Heartland Film Festival. I found him intelligent and unusually forthright about the game of Hollywood, how movies are made and marketed.

We talked quite a bit about his next project, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," the spin-off of the most popular X-Men character played by Hugh Jackman. Anticipation for this movie is through the roof, and we meandered into some geek chat about Wolverine's mysterious background and familial dynamics. Winter was clearly pleased with his movie, and that so many fans are dying to see it.

But today I learned that "Wolverine" will not be screened for critics in Indianapolis before it comes out one month from today. It will also not be screened in Cincinnati and Columbus, the two other major Midwest cities where screenings are held.

This is simply unprecedented. For a major, major film -- certainly one of the two or three most anticipated movies of 2009 -- to not screen anywhere in this region is unheard of. The reason given is a familiar refrain: money, or the lack thereof. The studios are telling us they simply can't afford to do advance screenings here.

I find this hard to believe. It is true that it takes a lot of effort to stage the promotional screenings held in the evenings where the public is invited -- they have to have extra staff, and security and representatives have to be paid to handle the logistics. But the cost for a critics' screening, held on a weekday morning, is negligible. Quite often, it's literally one or two people to run the whole event.

Screenings for Indy have slowly dropped off since The Indianapolis Star reassigned movie critic Bonnie Britton in fall 2006. But there's still a lot of local criticism going on, as the new seven-member Indianapolis Film Journalists Association can attest. And simply put, we can't do our jobs if we can't see the movies in advance.

For a while, some films have screened in Cincinnati and Columbus, but not Indy. This has galled the Indiana critics, since these are smaller cities with fewer media outlets. (Indianapolis is the 25th largest media market in the U.S.; Columbus and Cincy are 32 and 34, respectively.)

But the trend is catching up with everyone. The Cincinnati newspaper got rid of their film critic before the Indy Star did, and the Dispatch in Columbus laid off their critic recently. I believe The Cleveland Plain Dealer is now the only daily newspaper with a full-time critic between Chicago and Philadelphia.

With so many metropolitan papers dumping their critics, studios are more often eschewing to screen movies at all in those cities -- even though alternate newspaper, radio and Internet critics are still soldiering on there. But without the big stick of a 200,000-plus-circulation daily to anchor the screenings in a given city, studios are taking a pass, so critics for smaller outlets are being shut out. We want to pick up the slack, but we have to see the movies to do it.

We're entering very dangerous territory here. When whole swaths of the nation are being shut out of screenings for big movies like "Wolverine," the diversity of opinion about film is squeezed to a choke-hole. Soon, all film criticism will originate from either New York, LA or Chicago -- not because those will be the only newspapers with critics, but because those will be the only places movies are being shown.

Review: "Push"

There are super-heroes among us -- scuzzy heroes with amazing powers and bad hair.

"Push" is the latest in a line of movies not directly based on a comic book, but with a comic book vibe. In my preview of what I was going to review this week, I referred to "Push" as "this year's 'Jumper'" -- typical of my snarky sense of humor. Turns out I was pretty spot-on with my assessment. This movie starring Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning plays out in much the same style, and with about the same modest level of success.

The set-up is in the "X-Men" vein -- strangers walk among us who have strange and terrible abilities that they were born with. A shadowy government division -- named, simply, The Division -- hunts them down so they can experiment on them and exploit their powers. For some strange reason known only to Hollywood casting agents, all the heroes are under the age of 25 and really good-looking.

The interesting twist here (from screenwriter David Bourla) is that the super-powered fall into many specific categories. For instance, Chris Evans plays Nick, who is a Mover -- meaning he can move stuff around through telekinesis. His sidekick is Cassie (Fanning), a Watcher who can foretell the future, with varying reliability. Both have hair that looks like it hasn't seen any Pert in a few months, with Fanning's decked out in an array of pink and blue stripes.

A Pusher, by the way, is someone who can control other people's minds by pushing, or implanting thoughts in their head. For example, they can approach a total stranger and get their help by making them think they're old friends. They can even convince the weak-minded that they can put a loaded gun in their mouth and pull the trigger without any ill consequences.

There are two Pushers in the story: Kira (Camilla Belle), who escaped from The Division after getting injected with a power-boosting drug that killed all the other guinea pigs; and Carver (Djimon Hounsou), the Division chief who hunts her. Carver's right-hand man (Neil Jackson) is a Mover who's so talented he can even stop bullets.

This begs two questions. First: Since neither of the main characters is a Pusher, why isn't this movie titled "Mover" or "Watcher"? (Probably because they're not as catchy.) Second: Since The Division seems to be populated entirely by people who have the same powers as the people they're hunting, what is their ultimate aim? There's no talk about taking over the world, etc. All they seem to do is recruit or hunt other Movers, Pushers, etc. Are they just going for the biggest all-mutant list of Facebook friends?

The action takes place in Hong Kong, with Nick and Cassie trying to find Kira while avoiding Carver and a family of Chinese criminals who all have powers. It's a lot of chase-chase, with the future shifting as their actions do. Cassie keeps foreseeing their deaths, so they're trying to do something, anything, to keep that from happening.

At first I liked the idea of an underground society of mutants with different castes divided by powers. You've got Stitchers who can heal the wounded, Screamers who emit deadly sonic waves, Shifters who can temporarily change objects into other things; Sniffers who can track people by the things they've touched, and even Shadows who can keep people from being detected by Sniffers. It goes on and on.

But then I realized the limitless array of powers is essentially a storytelling crutch. It's like the ever-expanding list of spells and magical objects in the "Harry Potter" series. Whenever Harry & Co. encounter a new obstacle, there's always some new spell we've never heard of before, or some magical trinket, to solve their problems. There are no horizons on their abilities, which allows the storyteller to get into and out of sticky spots with minimal effort.

The same goes here. As soon as Nick and Cassie are in trouble, a new type of mutant is introduced to save the day. I half expected them to introduce a guy called The Plot Thickener whenever the action slows down.

1.5 stars out of four.