“You sure you’re on the right side?”
Everything that has an end has a beginning, as Hugh Jackman sharpens his claws once more in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the prequel to the highly successful film series from Marvel that took in over a billion dollars worldwide.
The film takes a look into the brooding anti-superhero’s mysterious past before the X-Men that spans over a century, which began in the 19th century as young James Howlett, son to plantation owners, where signs of his mutation first started to show.
After accidentally killing his adopted father, he left home with his half-brother Victor Creed, and they were inseparable since: serving in the Civil War, Vietnam, and even surviving a firing squad. Twenty years before the first X-Men movie, Wolverine became a member of Team X, a black ops team for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The shadowy government project known as Weapon X was responsible for giving Wolverine his adamantium skeleton. Led by right-wing militant William Stryker (Danny Huston), they were also responsible for the creation of Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber), Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), and several other mutants: with the purpose of capturing mutants for experiments in hopes of increasing their abilities and mutating baseline humans.
When his half-brother Sabretooth murdered his love Kayla Silver Fox (Lynn Collins) and Stryker betrayed him, Wolverine lashes out – literally to dish out his revenge. Now, everything that all of us feared and don’t understand becomes the one thing that will save us.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an eXcellent way to start off the summer blockbuster season of 2009: loaded with breathtaking action and filled with our favorite X-Men characters such as Gambit (Friday Night Lights‘ Taylor Kitsch) and Emma Frost (Tahyna Tozzi). Whether or not you’re a fan of X-Men and Wolverine, this is truly a film worth seeing more than once, as the highlight of the film is the ferocious fight between Wolverine and Sabretooth: two sides of the same coin, for they are equal yet opposite.
Still, this film is the opportunity to explore the emotional and mental psyche of the troubled Marvel Dark Knight known as Wolverine: always at war not only with the world, but also with the beast within himself. Wolverine could be considered as the “Man with No Name” of the X-Men: mysterious, strong, silent, deadly, rebellious but has a heart for others in need – as long as they don’t get on his bad side.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine begins cutting its way May 1.
