X-men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a fun summer movie and if you turn off your brain you'll enjoy it, but the more you think about it the more the small plot holes and problems begin to show up.None of them should ruin your enjoyment of the film but if you're a stickler for perfect accuracy they could be a problem.

Hugh Jackman plays Wolverine and he does an excellent job, which isn't a surprise as he has done a good job in the previous X-men movies. None of the other actors were truly great or bad. The man who played Wolverines brother(Liev Schreiber) was effective as a man similar to Wolverine who just went to far. Stryker (Danny Huston) was able to seem a credible villain to a character that effectively can't die. Ryan Reynolds also did a good job of being memorable enough early in the movie to be recognizable late in the movie even through the makeup.

The story itself was one that I mostly already knew.  Wolverines story as a young sickly child was told well enough in the few minutes and  his time with Stryker's Team was interesting but not great.

Overall that was my opinion of the entire movie.There were multiple good scenes, interesting ideas, all the plot points that needed to be hit were but nothing excited me about this movie. It just felt flat in many ways.

I don't know that i can truly articulate why because I'm not certain that I understand. I suspect that it is partially the problem of the prequel. I knew where the story was going and what had to happen to move it there too often.  But that can't be all of it because I have often enjoyed watching movies such as Lord of the Rings where i knew where it was going.

There is also the issue of the character never being in any real danger. There is the implication in the movie that if you cut off his head it might kill him, but I'm not entirely sure why everyone assumes this. If you can shoot him in the head and he'll get over it why would cutting his neck kill him?

Overall though I think it's because I find Wolverine a more interesting character when you don't know who he is or where he came from. Hints and ideas from the comics that may or may not be true work perfectly for this character. Seeing everything that actually happened doesn't work as well for me, but even that is not truly a criticism of the movie because the comics have already given his history and I already knew it.

All in all, if you like the X-men movies you'll enjoy this. It's considerably better than X-men 3 but probably not as good as x-men 2.  So go in aware that there will be a few misses on special effects and a couple plot points that you just have to go with and you'll generally enjoy this movie.