Wolverine and Friends (or Enemies, as it were)

Posted by Lou. The time is 5.52pm here in London, UK.

When you find yourself on holiday in a ye olde towne of England that has been suddenly overrun by very drunk, very hideous, unbearable late-teens/ early-20-somethings there is little else to do than retreat to a darkened cinema and hope to make it home afterwards without standing in vomit. Unfortunately – though perhaps in the end fortunately – ye olde townes have very little choice and so you inadvertently find yourself spending the Sunday night of a long weekend watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And loving it.

We all go to X-Men films to see Wolverine, right? He’s certainly worth it, with Hugh Jackman having perfected the combination of dry wit and physical prowess to be able to kick-arse and make you laugh out loud while watching it. In this he has a couple of one-liners that actually even made me forgive him for the shameful mess that was Australia. However, surprisingly he is almost upstaged – Leiv Shreiber is awesome. My opinion of him before this film was limited to “oh, he directed that rather bland adaptation of Everything is Illuminated (mmmm Eugene Hutz, mmm)” [that is a literal transcription of my thought process]. My opinion of him now is that he’s fucken’ awesome.

If those two don’t provide enough drool-worthy entertainment, there are also several tasty morsels in the supporting cast (I was particularly excited to see Dominic Monaghan’s name pop up in the credits). Okay, so you’re thinking that I’m being a leery hypocritical pervert, but it’s high time that Hollywood realise that women go see action films too, and that it wouldn’t hurt to pack the male cast with a wide variety of man candy for a change. And it's not like they're all rippling muscle and buffness (just Hugh and Ryan Reynolds) - we're much more subtle in attraction than that.

Yes, yes, there are some entirely unnecessary scenes that tip over into slapstick farce, but for the most part I thought the action was awesome (and admired the audacity of the setting upon which they partake in the climactic fight). Long live Wolverine.