Penny Thoughts ‘14—X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) *½

PG-13, 107 min.

Director: Gavin Hood

Writers: David Benioff, Skip Woods

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Will.i.am, Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Kevin Durand, Dominic Monaghan, Danny Henney, Ryan Reynolds, Tim Pocock, Julia Blake, Max Cullen

Ok. I’m going to start by saying that the third time around, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” didn’t bother me as much. The key part of that phrase is “as much.” It’s still pretty stupid and I have some major bones to pick with it. I’ll try to concentrate on different ones this time. You can read my original review here.

Here’s the thing. This was the movie that was leaked early and a critic reviewed the leaked version several weeks before the release date. It was a big scandal because the movie’s special effects weren’t finished yet, and the guy was fired, and it all may have been a very elaborate ploy by 20^th Century Fox to dredge up some buzz about the film before the real word on how terrible it was got out. I believe it was even a positive review.

Anyway, so I’m hanging out with a friend of mine in Chicago. We go to a bar after the first bar of the evening closed on us. My friend and the bartender are on pretty good terms and the Blackhawks weren’t worth talking about at that point in time, so the bartender says to us, “Wanna see the new Wolverine movie?” We didn’t, but it was too late to find anything else to do and we weren’t ready to end it yet. So we watched it. Every last frame with unfinished special effects, and it was terrible, and it was obvious that the special effects weren’t going to change much.

Here’s my new problem with this movie. The finished special effects are terrible. Really?! I mean, I think when I first reviewed it after watching a finished version in theaters I was just so appalled with everything else, the SFX didn’t even make that much of an impact on me. But today, on high definition Blu-Ray disc, these are some of the worst special effects I’ve seen on such a big budget release as this. Rarely do Wolverine’s claws even resemble anything of reality. They look bad for cartoon claws.

The special effects don’t get any better with any other aspect of the movie. Then there’s the design of Weapon XI/Deadpool. It seems like they ran out of time when coming up with some sort of original character design, so they just said, “what if he didn’t have a mouth?” I don’t know if that’s the way he was in the comic books at some time or not, but it looks like crap here. His non-mouth doesn’t even look the same from shot to shot. Maybe sometimes they did it with makeup and sometimes they removed it digitally, but it rarely matches from one shot to another.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. SMH.