Critics Say Wolverine Doesn't Quite Cut It

Despite a couple of “Nooooo” yowls, Wolverine is well-acted, with spectacular action and witty one-liners. The special effects are top-notch. A few plot points raise questions, such as how Wolverine lost his memory. And his romance with Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins) is unconvincing.

The L.A. Times

It’s a solid, efficient comic book movie that is content to provide comic book satisfactions of the action and violence variety. If it doesn’t rise to the heights of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, it doesn’t stray into Daredevil territory either.

It also helps that both Jackman and costar Liev Schreiber, who plays Wolverine’s even angrier half-brother Sabretooth (don’t ask), are fine actors who throw themselves into whatever they take on, whether it be Chekhov or comic books.

The Wall Street Journal

The first part of the exploration is fast, febrile and Forrest-Gumpish, what with Logan and his fang-flashing brother Victor, aka Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) fighting for their country — America, not Transylvania — through a century of savage conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam. Once that’s out of the way, though, Logan and Victor fall to fighting one another — the one with steel claws, the other with fingernails that might have left Howard Hughes feeling well-groomed — in a series of confrontations that keep coming down to cutlery; think of knives vs. sharpeners and you’ll have some sense of the film’s emotional resonance.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Apart from the heroic work Jackman has put into building up his physique, I wouldn’t say that he puts in a great performance. He’s either relaxed and amiable or he’s folding his face into a fist. It doesn’t matter. You like him, anyway. And as one of the film’s producers, he pushed for the film to be shot here and in New Zealand, rather than Canada. Consequently, the director, Gavin Hood (Rendition, Tsotsi), and the Australian cinematographer Donald McAlpine make sensational use of the South Island’s mountains and waterfalls.

Entertainment Weekly

You’d think all this would be enough shrinkwrapped backstory since the movie still needs space to introduce other, newer mutants for their moments in the spotlight. (Ryan Reynolds has fun as the adversary who later comes to be known as Deadpool; Friday Night Lights‘ Taylor Kitsch gives an inkling of the charms he might display in a future episode as Gambit; Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am makes an appealing feature-film debut as John Wraith, a dude with a gift for now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t.) But lest the ladies feel alienated by all the masculine conflict, the movie adds lover’s grief as an additional motive for moodiness.

Slate

The first time Jackman appeared shirtless, about 15 minutes into the movie, his absurdly pneumatic chest garnered one of the few laughs at the screening that I attended. I can understand why-there’s something ridiculous about the very being of Hugh Jackman, with his flaring nostrils and almost equine handsomeness. His best roles are the ones that harness that silliness, but even as a dour action hero, Jackman has enough charisma to emerge with his dignity intact. Liev Schreiber pulls out a few too many stops as the obscurely motivated Victor/Sabretooth, but you have to feel for the guy: From Shakespeare in the Park to this? And Lynn Collins made a lovely Portia opposite Al Pacino’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, but as Wolverine’s schoolteacher girlfriend, the quality of her mercy is a bit strained.

Salon

The bigger issue is that Wolverine is so uninvolving that you might not care whether you remember what happened 10 minutes ago. For a story that supposedly delves into the psychology of a character to help deepen our understanding of him, Wolverine doesn’t offer much more insight into this feral fighter than did the earlier X-Men pictures — Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X2 or even the messier, more shallowX-Men: The Last Stand, directed by Brett Ratner. Wolverine purports to tell us more and yet gives us less: It’s so cluttered and action-packed that the action ceases to mean anything — virtually nothing the characters do or say results in consequences that stick.

Time

Written by novelist David Benioff and Skip Woods, Wolverine was directed by Gavin Hood, a South African who earlier made two exercises in political solemnity, Tsotsi and Rendition. The new movie has a sharper look and a smarter film sense, because Hood is surrounded by the sort of artist-technicians who can lend cinematic swank to almost any action picture. But that’s now par for the course, and Wolverine doesn’t rise above the level of familiar competence. What holds it together is Jackman, an actor who suggests the decency that is meant to be at the core of his character. As Logan struggles to tame his Hulk-like temper, so Jackman works to fit his friendly, temperate persona into the action-film superhero mold.

The New York Times

X-Men Origins: Wolverine will most likely manage to cash in on the popularity of the earlier episodes, but it is the latest evidence that the superhero movie is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue. A twist at the end that gives poor Wolverine a bad case of amnesia – turning him into a kind of Jason Bourne with sideburns – is a virtual admission that nothing terribly interesting has been learned about the character. He forgets his origins before the movie devoted to their exposition is even over. It won’t take you much longer.

The New Republic

There are reversals and counter-reversals, double- and triple-crosses, truck and motorcycle and helicopter crashes, and enough Jackmanian shirtlessness that any so inclined could produce a detailed topographical map of the lats, pecs, delts, and various outcroppings of muscle that have not yet been named. (If Jackman’s bath scene in Australia was a carnal amuse-bouche, here he offers the all-you-can-eat beefcake buffet.) What Wolverine fails to do, however, is give us any real reason to care about the unfolding events.