My wife and I went to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine Saturday night, and I have to say that I was very disappointed. As I was walking out of the theater, my impression was that this movie did a bunch of things wrong, but it’s altogether possible that my disappointment was because I expected something that this movie was never intended to be.

If you’ve seen the commercials, you might be expecting something a little bit like the first three X-men movies (which, in truth, were pretty much just Wolverine movies with a more developed supporting cast), with Team X (including Deadpool?) standing in for the X-men. That’s not what you’re going to get. In truth, this is more like the Forrest Gump of superhero movies. Wolverine’s story briefly touches on the stories of the characters shown in the commercials, but only briefly, which makes their use in the commercials seem a bit… dishonest. Most of the other characters in the movie play very short roles, with the exceptions of the movie’s two main villains, Victor Creed (Sabretooth) and William Stryker^[a].

This movie was a huge disappointment, but I’m still cautiously optimistic about the proposed next installment in the X-men Origins series, Magneto.

One other quick note before I jump into spoilers. I wasn’t quite able to separate my disappointment in their treatment of the other characters from my appreciation of the movie’s other qualities, but my wife said it was a decent action movie. She did point out, however, that the fact that the hero and most of the other main characters in the movie can’t actually be hurt takes a lot of the dramatic tension away.

Now… spoilers.

More …

1. The next two largest roles are Kayla Silverfox and Gambit. Silverfox is believed to be dead for a major portion of the movie, and Gambit isn’t even introduced until pretty late in the game. Even then, Gambit’s biggest contribution (outside of the initial fight that any two superheroes must have on their first encounter) is flying Wolverine from New Orleans to Three-Mile Island. [↩]