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| Tookey's Review |
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| Trailer |
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| Released: |
2009 |
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| Genre: |
ACTION
SERIES
SCIENCE FICTION
THRILLER
PREQUEL
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
107 |
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Fans of the X-Men series – mainly, I would guess, geeky young men without any discernible super-powers - will know that the most charismatic of the mutants, nicknamed Wolverine and played by Australia's incredible hunk Hugh Jackman (pictured), came into the first of these movies without the ability to remember where he came from. This prequel tells us at exhaustive, indeed exhausting length, but it’s so unmemorable that it’s no wonder he couldn’t recall.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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There’s one nifty action sequence, where Jackman’s stunt double on a motorbike destroys two armoured vehicles and a helicopter, but that’s it for thrills.
The rest is a deadly dull, formulaic flick in which the US military (under a visibly bored Danny Huston) puts together a crack squad of mutants and tolerates their excesses of rape, pillage and mass murder, only for one of them, needless to say our hero, to get an attack of morality and walk away. For the rest of the movie, Wolverine is chased by the military and his nasty brother Sabretooth, played by Liev Schreiber, who gets to do a lot of evil grinning.
South African director Gavin Hood made the touching drama Tsotsi, but is ill-suited to the action genre. And, despite a pretence of morality and a fashionable hostility to the US military, the movie is pornographically violent, especially reprehensible in a film with a 12A certificate. Numerous people are stabbed and impaled, yet no blood is ever spilt – not a sensible message to be giving to children. The British Board of Film Classification has bungled again.
Even undiscerning fanboys may notice that this doesn’t measure up to the best super-hero movies, such as Spiderman 2 and Batman Begins. It feels twice as long as its 107 minutes. It’s woefully unimaginative, over-dependent on CGI effects, and wantonly wasteful of its big budget and talented cast. And it has only a week to make money in the multiplexes before it is wiped out by Star Trek.
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