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It’s not very often I go into a movie with the expectation of being let down and/or so frustrated by the horrible things done to the continuity that I consider going to just so I can feel a lot of negative emotions and pick it apart in a general way that only a fanatic nerd can do. I’ve been avoiding, for this very reason, the current X-Men movie which pretends to be an origin of Wolverine, but seems to be another instance of Marvel shoving random mutants around with stories that may or may not resemble the things that actually took place in the comic.

As I said, this movie was a complete letdown, especially compared with the fantastic Iron Man movie, and the good-but-not-as-good-as-Iron-Man movie featuring The Hulk. Also, it’s not as good as The Spirit and to even consider this on par with the previous X-movies is shameful. And, as you might expect, I have more than enough nerd rage built up after having seen it, and my general knowledge of X-Men (though not on the level of some, I feel I have enough information at my disposal and knowledge of the characters to be properly annoyed by the film) to fill something that is adequate entry. But, before I go into that, I figure I can get the good parts out of the way.

The good parts: Ryan Reynolds felt, for a brief moment, like Deadpool. The specific point in that movie when I felt like he was the characters rather early on (for obvious reasons) when he said “Okay… people are dead.” Also, whoever played Gambit looked like something akin to Ultimate Marvel’s incarnation of Gambit, but with better hair. Gambit and Deadpool, it should be noted, are two of my favorite characters in Marvel.

That’s pretty much it.

Now onto the bad stuff

The bad parts are, essentially, everything else in the movie. I’ve never been a fan of Hugh as Wolverine– he doesn’t fit any version of the character and he doesn’t have the kind of raw, generally frightening feel that the cartoons possess. Plus he’s way too tall. Also, people, really, his claws. I’m glad that they had them bone, but where was the blood?! In both bone and metal claws, there was never. any. blood. Ever. Even in the comics they bother to make the claws bloody or at least have a little bit of blood shoot out BECAUSE HE HAS GIANT WOUNDS IN HIS HAND.

They’re also too long, too high, and suddenly developed an edge whenever they shifted from bone to metal. I don’t get it. I could understand if he had, like, sharpened the bone beforehand, but he didn’t. They also wound up bigger, even though all that happened was just a simple bonding of metal. But I’m getting a little too picky on these claws and there’s so much else about the movie that frustrates me.

For instance: Deadpool. What the hell did they do to Deadpool? I mean, really. I know Deadpool. I know him better than I know anyone else in the whole X-Franchise. They completely ruined him. Even if they wanted to make a Deadpool movie after this, they’d gave to completely ignore everything– which I would appreciate because this movie was garbage– and make it right. Wade Wilson joined up in Weapon X because they said they would help treat his cancer, then he became a mercenary after Weapon X ditched him because the synthetic healing factor bonded with his cancer and all of the experiments they did on him drove him insane.

I don’t so much have a problem with Wilson’s original outfit. It looked pretty neat, and if I were making a more faithful interpretation of the character, I’d probably use the vest and so forth as a base.

Everything, as a whole, annoys me about this movie for a number of reasons. If it’s not things like that, then it’s that so many characters were just thrown in without any real meaning, or purpose. This “Weapon XI” thing was nonsense and just made the movie hard to follow. Plus, it turned Deadpool into someone who looked more like Baraka than it did Deadpool. I mean, really, they combined roughly 715 mutant abilities into Wilson, who really only had a healing factor that wasn’t his, and made him Baraka With Laser Eyes and Teleportation.

Which reminds me: the people making these movies need to bear in mind that not every mutant has the ability to jump around in the middle of a fight and look cool with doing it. Deadpool has never had the ability to cut bullets in half or spin his swords and reflect bullets. He is, in fact, not Gray Fox. No matter how awesome that would be, it’s just not true. Just like Gambit doesn’t have the ability to make his cards float. His power is generate energy and that’s it.

And Gambit’s eyes are, at base, black with red pupils. But now I’m getting really picky.

The battles were over the top, took too long, and generally made the movie go on much longer than it should be. It’s not like with 300 where the movie WAS the fights. It just felt shallow. There was no real reason for a lot of these fights other than “OH YEAH?!” as their primary justification, at least on the surface. Disappointing, really, considering Wolverine and Sabretooth going along beating the hell out of each other.

Interesting side note: in Ultimate X-Men, Sabertooth makes the accusation that he’s actually Wolverine’s son, and not brother like in this movie. Also, they aren’t related at all. At least, I’m fairly certain of that part.

So, I’m going to complain more about this “Weapon XI” crap.

These X-movies have had a horrible problem with just shoving random mutants into the movie to appeal to the fans. Obviously, if you’ve seen the previews, you’ve seen Cyclops and Emma Frost in addition to the standard fare that you’re expecting. Obviously I’ve got nothing too horrible to say against Scott. They do him well, considering that he’s involved with something that is generally retarded.

However, I also noticed Quicksilver and Toad. I’m not sure who else was supposed to be there, but I know that there’s probably a lot more than I expected.

I have a large complaint with Emma Frost being there. For starters: Emma’s primary ability isn’t turning into a diamond, she’s a psychic. She was more or less a kind of replacement for Jean Grey, only part of the Hellfire Club and dressed in a much more interesting way. Frost’s ability to turn into diamond didn’t take place until Grant Morrison started writing The New X-Men and Genosha went all to hell. Also, the ability has always been that she turns into a kind of solid “organic diamond”– whatever that means– while the movie has it look as though she just gets covered with a bunch of nicely cut diamonds.

I’ll accept that, just because I feel like it would be difficult to properly express the powers like it’s presented in the books. Some things you can’t do properly.

That doesn’t excuse, y’know, most of the movie.

Also, a lot of people have been going on about the after-the-credits ending and how it’s “Deadpool breaking the fourth wall” and, yeah, that was kind of clever and all and kind of almost made the thing redeemable… it was just ridiculous. Had I not known about that, going into it, I wouldn’t have bothered staying and wasting time.

If you notice, I didn’t really talk much about the plot. Mostly because I’m not entirely sure what was talked about. It was “Wolverine attacks people. Wolverine decides it’d be cool to attack people for the US Government. Wolverine feels bad. Sabretooth fucks up shit to make Wolverine mad. Wolverine gets mad. Random other people show up and do stuff.”

It’s really pretty shallow. There was also a lot of “Wolverine is sad” that felt so forced. I also decided to not consider anything in the movie whenever Wolverine’s love interest (who was a fucked up version of an actual character and wound up being Emma Frost’s movie-sister) “died” and they did the dramatic “NOOOOO!!!” thing. Those scenes, while apparently some kind of attempt to be dramatic, just feel, as I said, forced. They also totally break the flow and immersion and leave me rolling my eyes and feeling like they could have done something better.

On the whole, unless you’re a fan of the movies, don’t even bother with this thing unless you feel like being frustrated by an inadequate X-movie. If you must watch something X-related, watch Hulk versus Wolverine and the old 1990s animated series. Those are the best things out there, even if the dialogue on the 1990s series is kind of laughable at times. This just wasn’t even worth it. If you’re a fan of the comics, you’re probably busy complaining as it is, and may or may not be yelling at the movie screen when you go see it. Of course, you might also just have not seen it because, really, you knew it was going to be bad.

If you need me, I’ll be watching The Dark Knight to burn out the bad movie.