A great amount of the joy of superheroes with mutant powers is to watch them go head to head in one-on-one combat like some sort of glorified gladiatorial match. When I was a kid, I used to do this all the time with my G.I. Joes. I set up the characters, made up the storylines, supplied the desired sound effects, and then made the figures beat the hell out of each other. To dismiss that, and consequently this movie, as childish is sort of missing the point. Comic book movies are inherently childish. Sure every now and then comic-book movies can be elevated to great art (like say The Dark Knight or Sin City) but they never stray from their original appeal as childish action flicks. X-Men Origins: Wolverine seems to understand that. What I liked about this movie is that it avoided the pitfalls that made X-Men United (The third X-Men film) one of the worst comic book movies ever made. Sure Wolverine doesn’t have the artistic gleam of Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men films, what with developed characters like Rogue, Pyro, Magneto and Xavier. But it also doesn’t have the boatload of heavy-handed moral and political points that are unnecessarily brought up in the third X-Men and left spinning going nowhere in particular. Furthermore, and probably more importantly, unlike the X-Men United, Wolverine doesn’t kill off great characters in unimpressive, badly organized battle scenes. The fight scenes in Wolverine are much more sharply focused than the previous effort. There are no chaotic turf wars between armies of mutants here. Instead we have choreographed duels, which in my opinion are much more exciting and worthwhile. Like a kid playing with action figures it is hard to keep up a large-scale invasion while paying homage to awesome superpowers with only two hands. It is better to limit the battle to only a few figures and several duels. This keeps the fights exactly how they are supposed to be: Personal duels between heroes with powers that are somewhat equal to each other. (Like for instance, a fight between Wolverine and Magneto wouldn’t be good to watch. Magneto, who can control metallic objects, would kick Wolverine's adamantium ass in an instant. It’s much better to match Wolverine up with his brother Sabretooth, who basically has the same powers only he has claws instead of blades. ((My God, I am a huge dork. I swear X-Men is the only Comic franchise I know a lot about. I used to watch the TV show on Saturday mornings.)) The story should always come first of course, but the best story in an X-Men movie will involve duels, hopefully several of them. That is the best thing about superheroes, and the X-Men in particular.
This movie recognizes this and within its convenient storyline there are duels between Wolverine and Agent Zero, the Blob, Gambit, Deadpool, and his brother and nemesis Sabretooth. I especially liked this movie because they finally introduced some of my favorites: Particularly the Blob and Gambit. I had been looking for Gambit for the last three movies. Here he finally is and although I would have liked to see more of him, the part they gave him was cool enough for now (Give him his own movie!). This movie isn’t a must see movie but it does contain some good fights between some of your favorite X-Men. Sort of like the stuff I would come up with as a kid. Oh yeah, and just like when I was a kid, Wolverine usually always won.
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