By Matt Fleming and Jarrod Jones. This is the ANTI-MONITOR podcast, where we believe we’re the best there is at what we do, but in actuality we’re probably not even close. This week, Jarrod and Birdy revisit 20th Century Fox’s first ill-advised attempt at getting creative with Marvel’s mutants, ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’. They discuss the very nature of ill-advised superhero studio films, getting Sabretooth right, and how nothing about the X-Men makes any damn sense. But before they do, they talk about their personal experiences walking down memory lane with FX’s ‘American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson’.
As always, be wary for spoilers throughout, and please enjoy.
ANTI-MONITOR: MATT — The law of diminishing returns is on full display in the limp X-Men Origins: Wolverine. After the franchise departure of Bryan Singer, X-Men films went off the rails for a bit, and it’s this two-hour turd we have to thank for the newly rebooted mutant-verse. While Hugh Jackman is game, as always, the movie is hampered by a bloated script and an abundance of characters nobody cares about. Fan service misses the mark, and we’re left with Taylor Kitsch as cinema’s sole depiction of Gambit.
For a movie that cost $150 million, Origins is decidedly cheap looking. The cartoon-level CGI on display is distracting and laughable for the duration. From the moment young Jimmy/Logan/Whateverine discovers his claws the viewer has to be aware that this movie is going to make fans miss the halcyon days of Brett Ratner. If you want a Wolverine stand-alone, just wait for his Adventures In Japan.
ANTI-MONITOR: JARROD — I’ve learned to temper my expectations when it comes to cinematic comic book adaptations, and one film that played a big part in my disillusionment was X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In a feeble attempt to keep the X-Men movie machine churning (thus keeping a then-burgeoning Marvel Studios at bay), Fox’s first Origins movie (the second would have been Origins: Magneto) proved to be unwieldy at best and confusing at worst, thus becoming, at the time, the most awful X-Men movie to date. No small feat considering the film that had come before.
Whatever Gavin Hood’s intention was (probably to appease the studio brass paying him a boatload of money to direct a superhero movie), Origins became a tragic footnote in the manual, “How To Not Make X-Men Movies The Marvel Way!” The Wolverine was still four years away, but it may as well have been a lifetime.
CONSENSUS: Too dumb for comic book fans and too esoteric for casual movie fans, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a horrifying glimpse of what happens when a cold-blooded studio attempts to interpret a superhero comic. — 1.5 out of 10
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