Quick Wolverine Reactions

I'm not sure Wolverine is a film with enough content to justify the kind of blow-by-blow analysis I like to give awful movies, so I'll keep this a little briefer than normal.

The Good - Hugh Jackman and Liev Schrieber each do really well in their parts, and have great screen chemistry as both friends and enemies. Which makes the fact that they rarely spend any time onscreen together kind of annoying. Also, seeing it in Canada meant that there was a great reaction every time Wolverine reminded someone where he was from.

The Bad - Everything else. Really, there's so much wrong that I'm going to go point form:

- The effects are so cartoonishly awful. The decision to go all-CGI with claws was a critical error when the company doing the FX work can't accomplish even the most basic compositing. There's a scene right after Wolverine first gets the claws in which he's looking them over in a mirror and it honestly looks like Hugh Jackman is in the real world and his claws are in Toontown.
- Brian Cox has maybe the greatest voice of his generation, which, along with his incredible acting ability gives him a peerless screen presence. So when you're casting a younger version of him you need to do a little better than the shockingly flat Danny Huston. Seriously why not just hire some actor who looked a little like Cox and bring Brian in to dub the voice? It worked fine in Space Cowboys.
- There's a grand total of one coherent fight scene in the movie. It makes the slightest visual sense because the character of Deadpool is entirely CGI for the fight, and the people doing the CGI obviously aren't talented enough to handle adding a digital character to a shakycam sequence. It made me wish that all the characters had been CGI for every fight scene.
- Seriously, the action is only watchable when there's a digital effect or it goes to slow motion. Often both happen at the same time.
- Too many stupid plot things to get into here, so I'm just going to pick one. Fake Brian Cox sends a guy named Agent Zero to kill Wolverine. Agent Zero has two powers - 1: He is an incredibly good shot. 2: He can jump a little higher than a normal person can jump. Wolverine kills him, and we cut back to Fake Brian Cox, who announces "He really didn't have a chance - the only thing that can kill Wolverine is adamantium bullets." He says this while looking at a velvet-lined box containing a revolver and said adamantium bullets. Um... if you had those, why didn't you give them to the man whose power is that he's a really good shot?
- It had one of the most egregiously bad post-credit easter eggs I've ever seen. Wolverine is in a bar in Japan. He orders a drink. The end. Seriously? That's it? You know what a better ending would have been?

(The Scene: A bar in Japan.)

WOLVERINE ORDERS A DRINK. IRON MAN SITS DOWN NEXT TO HIM.

WOLVERINE: Who are you?
IRON MAN: My name is Tony Stark, and I've come back in time to tell you that in thirty years I'm going to need you to join a superhero team I'm putting together.
WOLVERINE: If you don't need me for thirty years, why did you go to the trouble of travelling back in time?
IRON MAN: I was hoping to salvage this movie.

WOLVERINE DRINKS HIS SHOT.

WOLVERINE: You're about 80 minutes too late for that, bub.

So that's the good and the bad, now let's look at the So Ugly It Made Me Gasp In Horror In The Middle Of A Crowded Theatre - Patrick Stewart shows up at the end for a brief Cameo. Actually, that's not true. Patrick Stewart's voice shows up, coming out of a twisted CGI monstrosity head that's supposed to look like Patrick Stewart. If your CGI people can't even handle metal claws convincingly, why would you ask them to try a human face? And how could they get this looking so wrong? It's not like we don't have footage of Patrick Stewart from 30 years ago. It's called the movie Dune. Or if you don't mind him looking a tiny bit older, the entire run of Star Trek, the Next Generation.

Jesus, people, come on.