The New Mutants

The Fear Hunter

The New Mutants
USA 2020 Directed by Josh Boone
20th Century Fox

The New Mutants is the latest and last of the 20th CenturyFox X-Men movies, by way of being a spin off, much like the original comic was. I can’t talk about the original source, though, because I’ve never read it. It’s also had a very troubled production history. I first saw the trailer three years ago in cinemas as a ‘coming soon’ and then it was pulled and there were reshoots and it continued to get pulled and rescheduled around other tent-pole superhero movies until, the last time it was moved, was because coronavirus hit. It finally got a cinema release, for the few cinemas still open, in August of this year but it wouldn’t have done much at the box office, I would have thought, because, you know... Coronavirus guys!

The film follows the adventures of five new mutants who are being held prisoner, under the guise of being treated medically to find their powers and determine whether they are a menace to others (spoiler, that’s obviously not the real reason they’re being held there... well, not quite). The five are played by Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga and, the newcomer to the ‘patients’, Blu Hunt. The ‘questionable’ doctor who seems to be the only person locked in with them and who has mutant powers herself is played by Alice Braga (I'm not sure where the cleaners are supposed to be). However, a day after Blu Hunt’s character comes to stay, things start going wrong for the mutants and it looks like their collective pasts are catching up with them in the form of various fears and, frankly, some very cool looking creatures which look a little like the Slender Man but with big, gnashy Venom teeth. Can the five learn to work together to defeat their mysterious foes?

Well, yeah, of course they can. And, as it happens, it turns out to be a quite entertaining movie. Not bad at all, though, certainly it is a troubled film, as you can see from the number of times it got pulled and rescheduled. Even further reshoots were required at some point which, due to the teens having aged since the original footage was shot, didn’t happen in the final instance.

Like the other X-Men films put out by Fox, the time frame continuity on this is shot to hell. There is evidence to suggest it was supposed to take place during the events of X-Men: Apocalypse (reviewed here) and, also, evidence on screen to support it taking place after the events of Logan (reviewed here... even though I’m still not sure how the heck these films even join up credibly themselves). It makes no sense at all and... well... I’m not sure what year it’s supposed to be set but I do know they have my old Cathode Ray Tube TV up in their attic so... yeah, your guess is as good as mine.

Unfortunately, it’s not just timeline continuity that’s the problem here. There’s a scene early on in the film where Blu Hunt slams into a force field at full pelt, causing her to bash her nose in, starting it bleeding from both nostrils. Unfortunately, there’s a couple of close up shots in the same scene where the blood from her nostrils has gone. Her power is she’s a quick healer then? Oops, no, apparently not because, in the very next scene, her nostrils are back to bleeding from the accident. Hmm... I don’t know if this continuity was a casualty of the reshoots or was just slack the first time around. No clue but... it’s very noticeable. Maybe they'll digitally correct this for the Blu Ray release.

Another thing which puzzled me is when the gang of five start bonding and get all The Breakfast Club on the audience. They find a polygraph in the attic and start playing a kind of non-dare version of 'truth or dare' with it. I just can’t figure out where they suddenly got all the paper from to keep the polygraph running? Quite strange, in all honesty.

Now, you may remember the film was pitched, very definitively, as a horror film when the trailers came out and... well it’s kind of like that, in a way. It certainly uses the cinematic language of the horror film to weave its simple story but, the problem is, the source of the evil things that go bump in the night is pretty obvious after the first ten or twenty minutes... so it all seems somewhat less concerning. I honestly thought the director was trying to lull me into a false sense of security and that he was suddenly going to pull the rug from under me at the last minute but... no, alas. The source of all their problems is actually the one you figure out from the start so, yeah, it could maybe have strived to be less obvious, to be honest. It kind of takes the dark sting out of things.

There were a couple of nice little things in it though. At one point, Blu Hunt is told that she’ll get out of there... “Probably before the rest of us cuckoos.” This is almost a double reference, I felt. One, because the five are being held in something like a psychiatric facility (which is where some of it was shot in real life, apparently)... and so it could be considered a reference to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. However, given the special talents of the teenagers, I couldn’t help but think it might also be a reference to John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos so, yeah, a nice double reference, I reckon.

And there’s also some nice stuff happening with the music (including a very Glass-like end credits piece). Going from X-Files to X-Men, we have a nice score from composer Mark Snow (sadly not on CD at time of writing), which is pretty good. There’s a lovely moment when Charlie Heaton’s character notices something up with one of the washing machines and as the sound design of the washing machine continues, you notice a rhythm which blends into the percussion on the score. So, yeah, as obvious as this film is, it still has some nice ideas and moments like this that elevate it to a point farther than some of the shoddier X-Men films.

And, yes, not much else to say about The New Mutants other than, it doesn’t get dull and I liked it enough to hopefully buy the Blu Ray when it hits the mid-year sales. It has a wonderful bunch of actors doing their thing and, although it doesn’t quite get into the realms of horror as much as it seems to want to, it manages to entertain and I would have liked to see where the other two parts in what was supposed to be a trilogy might have gone. Alas, before this film was even finished, the director nixed the idea of a post-credits teaser because, by then, the rights to the X-Men had reverted to Disney when they bought 20th Century Fox so, while I’m sure this is not the end of the X-Men movies, I’m guessing they’ll be redeveloped to dovetail into the main Marvel Cinematic Universe and recast with new faces and adventures. So we’ll never get an actual sequel to this one... which is a shame because it’s quite enjoyable, for the most part.

X-Men - Dark Phoenix

50 Shades Of Jean Grey

X-Men - Dark Phoenix
USA 2019 Directed by Simon Kinberg
UK cinema release print.

Well, my credibility as a reviewer is tested again as I seem to be of a completely opposite opinion to the rest of the world about this movie. I can’t remember hearing as much negative word of mouth about a film as I have about X-Men Dark Phoenix and, I have to say, since the continuity of the X-Men series was completely destroyed early on in their run, I have found the series to be a bit hit and miss, to say the least. And news just came in that the box office on this one is a disaster so... yeah, I guess I’m a bit out of synch with people in general. This one, however, is one of the better entries in the film series as a whole as far as I’m concerned and, I have to say, I really wasn’t expecting that.

The film is yet another adaptation... and I use that word in a very loose sense here... of the Dark Phoenix story arc from the comics and the first time around they tried this with Marvel Girl (aka Jean Grey), was way back in the first real mis-step of the series... X- Men - The Last Stand. In that film, Jean Grey was played by the wonderful Famke Jansenn in what turned out to be... definitely not the super-group’s last stand. Here she’s played by Sophie Turner and, over the last few films, I’ve really got used to her in the role and here, where she has to carry big chunks of the plot as the film is literally centred around her and her ‘Dark Phoenix’ incarnation, she proves herself more than capable of carrying the movie.

And, like the title implies, it’s a dark film. Well... mostly. It maybe is a little too light at the end but there is the death of one of the major characters fairly early on in the movie (no, I’m not going to spoil it and say which one) and, although I was kinda hoping for a Blake’s Seven style bloodbath at the end here, it does lighten up a little on the aftermath. Also, this is definitely the last of the X-Men films as we have come to know them. In a final twist coming in hard from the real world, this part of the Marvel Universe owned by 20th Century Fox is now owned by Disney (who now own Fox) and so when the characters inevitably return, I expect they’ll be going for a completely different look and feel so they can dovetail them into the current Marvel Cinematic Universe so, yeah, end of an era.

What this also means is it doesn’t make good on the post credits sequence of the previous movie and nor does it have its own post credits tease. More annoyingly, perhaps, is that the developing plot line of Quicksilver being Magneto’s son without the father realising yet is never finished off. No resolutions on that front here so... it’s kind of a shame they didn’t sort this loose end out.

However, almost everything else about this movie... I liked. The strong cast of regulars supporting Sophie Turner such as James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult etc were all great... as was Jessica Chastain as the lead alien villain of the piece. The action set pieces were good and the story was a little smaller in its focus but there is still a sense of something huge at stake here... not just the future safety of the Earth but also the impact of the consequences of events here flipping public attitudes to mutant-kind back to those of non-acceptance and intolerance (something which I don’t think was credibly resolved at the close of this film, to be honest).

There are also some nice shot compositions and transitions too, including a nice moment where, after pulling a wooden chest out and revealing his Magneto helmet, Fassbender pulls it down onto his head as a way of showing the audience he’s coming out of retirement which then immediately cuts to a similar close up of McAvoy as Professor X pulling off his Cerebro helmet.

There’s also Hans Zimmer’s score which, even though I love this composer (see here for a review of one of his wonderful live shows), I was somewhat sceptical of. As it happens, he does a really good job here and I’m looking forward to grabbing the CD of this one as soon as it goes on sale (it’s rumoured there will be a proper CD release sometime after the stupid download and I hope this is the case here... although the company might have a change of heart after seeing the box office if we’re extra unlucky).

The special effects look pretty good too and even the Magneto stuff, which I sometimes find a bit rubbishy looking, was pretty amazing this time around.

On the downside, this film continues to throw continuity to the wind and, after the events we heard hinted at in Logan (reviewed here), totally fails to conform to them in this movie and has you wondering just who the heck is green lighting writing decisions such as these.

However, despite the odd grumble, I have to say that this is easily the best Marvel movie so far this year.... after the not too terrible Captain Marvel and the, well, way too terrible and disappointing Avengers Endgame. X-Men Dark Phoenix walks all over them, in my opinion and I am just breathing a sigh of relief that, even though it’s had its ups and downs, the franchise is definitely going out on a high note here... despite what other reviewers would have you believe. Will definitely be picking this one up on Blu Ray the week it comes out over here and, you never know, might go back and have another look at it at the cinema too (the IMAX 3D was quite good on this one, for a change). Definitely a darkish film, like a few of its predecessors (one might even say a Dark Grey film) but that’s definitely a strength and it looks like a solid entry into the franchise to me.

Deadpool 2

Pool Runnings

Deadpool 2
2018 USA Directed by David Leitch
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’ve tried to keep it to a minimum but... slight spoilers.

Okay so, just over two years since the fairly awesome Deadpool movie (reviewed here) hit our cinemas we finally have Deadpool 2 and it’s... err... okay, well it’s really not bad, I suppose... ish.

Actually, I did find this sequel kinda disappointing to be honest... I just can’t put my finger on why that was because the performances by the likes of Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Brianna Hildebrand and Zazie Beetz were all pretty cool. Likewise, the script wasn’t too bad and although I found it a little bit more dense in terms of semi-obscure Marvel Comics and Marvel Cinematic Universe references (I suspect some people will not have a clue that there are certain jokes here) it was pretty “full on” and moved a mile a minute. Added to that, the direction and action editing wasn’t bad, with David Leitch, who directed Atomic Blonde (reviewed here) jumping into the main chair on this one... at least you could understand what was going on most of the time.

Why, then, did I feel this movie was fun but not all that engaging?

Well, it doesn’t help that one of my favourite characters from the first film is basically killed off in the first five or ten minutes. Now, it has to be said, since this film’s big new character, Cable, is a time traveller, it kinda felt this was an easy set up for the first major casualty of the film to return at the end. The strange thing was, the film-makers didn’t take the easy way around to this (nor one which made any sense in terms of how we’ve seen the way their version of time travel works earlier in the film... temporal logic flies completely out the window by this point) and have saved it for one of the mid-closing credits sequences in the movie. Which is fine but, since the jokey and metatextual nature of the majority of those extras could possibly be taken as a separate thing apart from the movie, I and a couple of people I spoke to, couldn’t quite work out if the character was supposed to be alive for the next movie or not (if there is one). So, yeah, it’s kind of puzzling. Either way, though, there’s not too much of the particular character in question (who I won’t reveal here) in this and so I was not happy about it.

I was even less happy when I watched a somewhat James Bondian opening title sequence which kinda commented on what the audience’s state of mind must have been in after the pre-credits sequence in which said character died. I really didn’t need to be told how I was supposed to be feeling and, like I said, I was already expecting time travel shenanigans by this point.

Another thing which niggled a little is that another of my favourite characters from the first film... didn’t have a heck of a lot to do in this one either, it has to be said. I wanted to see more of a particular person in this and that just didn’t happen for me... although that character's arc since the first movie is kinda cute, at least.

There were, of course, loads of good things about the movie too and, like I said, it’s really not a bad experience at all... I just didn’t love it like I did the first one.

Okay so, good things...

Well there are a couple of nice new characters. One of them didn’t last that long (although, again, time travel to wipe out past incidents people!) but the one who did, Domino (played really well by Zaxie Beetz) was a pretty cool one. Domino’s super power is good luck which Deadpool argues is not cinematic. Then the cast and crew spend time demonstrating just how visually interesting and comedic it is throughout the rest of the film, of course. I loved the way how sometimes things would just fall into place for her and at other times, the action would pre-empt and set things up to her advantage. For example, we see some stuff happening with a bus heading towards the walls of the building she’s in just before we hear her say something along the lines of “We could really use a bus right now”. Said transport crashes through the walls for her to use a half a second later.

Also, Cable’s character does go through kind of an emotional arc and Brolin plays him really well... I’m really beginning to get the hang of this actor now. He brought a lot of depth and emotion to Thanos in Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed here) and he’s similarly interesting and three dimensional here.

Other good stuff includes a battle between Deadpool and Cable in prison where our hero tries to stop Cable from killing a young boy before he has the chance to do horrifying things in the future. The problem here, though, is that probably nothing else in the film really tops this sequence, which must be about half the way through the movie and the rest of the film felt a little like an anticlimax in comparison. However, it’s a very nice sequence and, like I said, the film really isn’t a bad one.

Another great thing is the quality of the jokes. I said that a lot of them are going to go over some people’s heads but there’s a lovely moment where the character bridges the gap, so to speak, of the various Marvel franchises by cracking a line made famous in some of the MCU movies which I really appreciated. Plus, the very first thing you see on screen of a certain musical paperweight is going to get some wide grins I’m sure. Not to mention some of the franchise crossing and even, in a weird way, comic book company crossing in some of the post-credits scenes. In fact, there are a fair few jokes at the expense of the DC universe in this movie too, which got some laughs from the audience I was with (despite having to wait 40 minutes for a broken projector at Cineworld to be repaired before the movie started).

All in all, I find I don’t have too much to say about this one, to be honest. My hope is that there was just so much going on with it that I need to see it again to process it properly and then I’ll maybe enjoy it more then. I usually refer to the Ryan Reynolds character as being similar to Groucho Marx crossed with the superhero genre and, if I were to push the analogy, I might say that the original Deadpool felt a little like one of the early, Marx Brothers masterpieces of the late 1920s and early 1930s whereas, Deadpool 2 is more like one of their later, not so outrageously funny but still fairly entertaining efforts. If you’re a Deadpool fan you may find yourself a little less enamoured with this one but, saying that, I seem to be pretty much in the minority on this one. Not the best Marvel movie I’ve seen but, absolutely nowhere near the bad ones either. Hopefully the third one, if there is one, will recapture the spirit of the first.

Logan

Citizen Shane

Logan
USA 2017
Directed by James Mangold
UK cinema release print.

And here we go again with what is probably the last of the X-Men movies to feature the popular 1970s creation Weapon X, aka Wolverine... at least with Hugh Jackman in the titular role and before 20th Century Fox start on the inevitable reboots to retain the options on the characters (one would suppose). That being said, Logan doesn’t quite feel like the majority of the X-Men movies out there, although it does have some of the feel of The Wolverine (reviewed by me here), which is to be expected since that movie was also directed by James Mangold.

This movie has a harder 15 rating over here and an R rating in America (and is on its way to becoming the biggest earning R rated movie they’ve had, by the looks of it). What that means in terms of the central character is that the violence is exactly as grim as you might expect from some of the comics and the tone is quite downbeat. The story content, for example, exactly matches that grimness, giving us a film set ten or so years in our future where there are no more mutants being born and, out of the few who are left, the two we are most concerned about here are both dying. It’s been said that this is Patrick Stewart’s last go at the Professor X character too and, for this one, he impressively lost a lot of weight for the role so he could play a very sick version of his iconic character... one who is prone to brain seizures which, if they are left unchecked and without medication, are capable of killing everyone around him. So we have a future where Wolverine and a mutant called Caliban are looking after the Professor but are also in hiding due to an incident in their past. You do get to hear what this incident, roughly, is but a lot of it is left to the imagination and no real details are revealed... which is a shame because I would have liked to know a little more.

And then, into this grim world comes a mutant child who has been genetically injected, along with other children, and raised from the DNA samples you may remember being ‘retrieved’ in the post credits scene from the last movie in the series, X-Men: Apocalypse (reviewed here). And the government programme that created this group of pre-teen killing machines, as shown in the film in no uncertain terms, wants them all back as they escaped before they could be murdered in favour of another programme. And so, in the case of one of the children, Laura (played nicely by Dafne Keen), it kind of falls on the reluctant Logan and the enthusiastic but extremely cranky Professor X to get her to a place called Eden... the origins of which I won’t spoil for you here.

And that’s that. The movie is a road trip film with certain X-Men-like events happening and a kind of bonding between Logan and Laura as the three main characters are thrown into the mix together. The director also exhibits a certain passion for showing one of his key influences, the old Alan Ladd version of Shane, up on the screen and, I have to say, it was kinda nice to see Jack Palance shoot Elisha Cook Jr on a large screen again. I have to say, though, that the references dotted about all over the place in reference to this movie are not exactly subtle and I think they could have been a little less overt and seemingly important than they are made out to be here.

But it’s not a bad little film, to be honest. It didn’t quite hit all the marks for me and I think I preferred the other two Wolverine-centric movies over this one but... it’s still a pretty good movie and much better than, say, the third movie, X-Men - The Last Stand, and the relatively recent X-Men - Days Of Future Past (reviewed here). I think it does the main character a little less justice than he deserves and it seems like he’s not learned anything from the arc which has brought him to where he is in this one but, maybe he’s as confused at the cracked continuity of the series of films as his audience, perhaps?

I hate to break it to anyone but this film in no way attempts to fix the completely bonkers lack of joining up and co-existing of various elements of the X-Men franchise, which seems to have been compounded and made worse with every movie made since the third one (except maybe for the second of the movies featuring Deadpool, from last year... you can read my review of that one here). It doesn’t explain how Wolverine was able to have Professor X in his Patrick Stewart body back at the end of The Wolverine and nor does it explain why, at the beginning of Days Of Future Past, he once more had adamantium claws when we’d clearly seen them stripped back down to bone claws in the previous film. And there are some other obvious errors which I won’t go into here but which make this, once again, impossible to exist with the other films in the franchise... something which can be said for pretty much every movie since The Last Stand.

But never mind... flawed as this movie contnuity is, there are some really nice things in it, not least of which is that the X-Men have also become fictional characters in a series of comics published by Marvel. Actually, although the various comics throughout the movie look and feel like 1970s issues of X-Men, they were in fact created with new artwork for the movie... so if you’re looking for a specific key issue which is used as an important plot point here then please don’t bother, the issue doesn’t exist outside of this movie.

I haven't got much else to say about this one, to be fair, but I did enjoy it and I’ll probably watch it again when it gets its inevitable Blu Ray release. There’s also a nice Marco Beltrami score which gives it a different feel to what I was expecting... almost playing against the tone of the film in some places but still managing to somehow work. There’s also some good song placement needle dropped in on this one so, all in all, the music was pretty good and I’m certainly looking forward to listening to a CD release of Beltrami’s music at some point.

If you’re a fan of the X-Men movies then you shouldn’t have a problem with Logan. It’s not an all out action fest like some of the films but, at the same time, the violence in this is quite intense and, certainly, fans of the Wolverine character from the comic books should enjoy this one. It’s definitely a mature take on the characters and, in this case, it’s also a depressing one so, you know, don’t go to this one expecting to come out on a high. If you go in knowing that from the outset... and I’m sure most people can figure out what’s going to happen in this one anyway, just by looking at the trailers... then you should have an okay time with it.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Mystique’s Roadshow

X-Men: Apocalypse
2016 USA Directed by Bryan Singer
UK cinema release print.

Partial Warning: The only spoilers in here
are already revealed in the trailers for the film.

I was fulling expecting to have to title this review Apocalypse, No! and to really give this movie some stick. Well, as it turns out, X-Men Apocalypse, the 12th X-Men movie in the series, is actually one of the more entertaining, technically competent and dramatic of the movies in the franchise. What a shame, then, that the writers still find themselves unable to correct the glaring continuity errors thrown up by the movies following the third film in the series, X-Men - Last Stand... something which everyone was pretty much hoping they would have been able to finally put to rest with the ‘time fixing’ previous, mostly awful installment in the franchise, X-Men - Days Of Future Past (reviewed by me here).

The way I see it we’ve got two main problems in the cinematic narrative that really aren’t taken care of. One is the previous movie starting out from a point where the original timeline version of Professor X, played by Patrick Stewart, is alive and well and somehow still inhabiting a body with the same physical appearance and vocal chords, even though he was killed before Jean Grey died, which Wolverine from that timeline clearly remembers happening. So they shot themselves in the foot straight away as far as I can tell.

Next we have them journeying back to a time after the Cerebro machine was already built in the X-Men First Class timeline, therefore not correcting the fact that Professor X and Magneto were supposed to have built it together.

Thirdly, we have the X-Men Origins - Wolverine movie (reviewed by me here) fairly compromised in various ways and... I’m not even going to attempt to go there and unravel the fallout on that.

Most of the other ‘seeming’ continuity errors are, for the most part, explainable but it’s really a shame that the same writers who have given us a script as interesting and entertaining as this one can’t be bothered to solve these issues properly. This is what happens when you don’t properly follow the franchise bible folks... this is pretty much the ‘George Lucas’ way of ‘ignoring stuff writing’ that’s going on here... and it’s only twelve films in!

Alas, not only does it not correct these errors... it seems to compound them further in some sequences. Also... what gives with the actors in this trilogy (this film and the previous two X-Men badged movies) being set in three different decades of the timeline? The 1960s (X-Men - First Class... reviewed by me here), the 1970s (X-Men - Days Of Future Past) and the 1980s (X-Men - Apocalypse) are all covered by the same actors playing mutants and humans alike who... somehow... don’t seem to age at all in the movies between decades. Okay, so in the case of Wolverine and Mystique you can kinda understand it but everyone else? This is not good time-lining, people? I guess that’s why Magneto’s son is revealed as Quicksilver perhaps (no spoilers here folks... it’s in the trailer) but a certain other mother/son relationship is kept under wraps still (as it was in X-Men 2). Michael Fassbender still looks a little too young but can maybe get away with it. The other two... people might not find it all that credible, methinks.

Also... it’s interesting that we have Quicksilver’s sister absent here but, she’s all over the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ Avengers franchise... with her origins somewhat different to the comic and with Quicksilver already killed off in that franchise. I’m wondering why more casual viewers to these films aren’t questioning this, to be honest. Or maybe people just don’t care?

Anyway, I suppose I’d better mention some of the good stuff about this movie now, right? Since I liked it so much.

Apocalypse is played absolutely brilliantly by Oscar Isaac, who manages to play a pretty shallowly written character with the amount of conviction necessary to make these cardboard bad guys stand out and seem way more interesting and vital than they perhaps usually are. You believe in him and his power to galvanise his ‘four horsemen’ and I really appreciated the Egyptian tint to the proceedings in the earlier part of the film. A very strong opening set in ancient Egypt satisfied my own penchant for the iconography of the time and place and, amazingly, the rest of the film lives up to the amazing opening sequence... not just in spectacle but in the way the characters interact. And that includes a lovely opening title design which matches the style of a lot of the previous films but with a load of entertaining ‘historical colour’ thrown in for good measure.

Michael Fassbender,  James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence all do a bang up job and they are ably supported by new and old cast members alike. The continuing drama of Magneto’s back story is extremely moving and takes us right back to reminders of the opening sequences of both X-Men and X-Men - First Class, building on the inherent, rich material of the character’s troubled legacy and adding to the psychological motivation of the character, explaining why he is who he is, still, and why he does what he does. It doesn’t quite explain the way in which the character veers towards the end of the movie, I think, but the choice he makes doesn’t break the boundaries of credibility too far and I think they just about get away with it without compromising Magneto too much, to be fair.

Evan Peters’ Quicksilver is great again in this one. He’s written well and his big set piece, which took some months to shoot and which involved him being on the set longer than any of the other cast members, by all accounts, is another triumphant one... with the quirky humour of the character coming out in a high pressure situation. Singer catches a repeat trick stylistically too, with composer John Ottman’s magnificent score stopping dead as the character is backed up again with a famous pop song for the entire sequence. Which is something which I suspect audiences will subconsciously get a lot of enjoyment out of... even if the sequence isn’t quite up to the calibre of the previous movie (which was one of the few good things about X-Men - Days Of Future Past).

And that’s about it for this one. If you like X-Men movies then this is certainly a good one... I’d say it’s my seventh favourite in the series so far. So don’t miss out on this one unless, like me, the screaming continuity problems of these films drives you absolutely mad. Then you might have a problem.

Deadpool

Metatext Tool

Deadpool
2015 USA/Canada
Directed by Tim Miller
UK cinema release print.

I have absolutely no idea who Deadpool is.

That is to say, he’s an early 1990s comic book creation... a time when I’d mostly given up on superhero comic books for... any other comic books that were more interesting. What I’m saying here is... I can’t judge this thing in terms of it being a good or bad adaptation.

I didn’t like the trailer for this movie much either... but the only time my friend, who actually did like the trailer, could go and see this was the first night it opened. So it was pretty much sold out for most of the screenings but we managed to get in. I’m really glad we did, as it happens.

Now I was going to be all sure of myself and say this is the third comic book movie I’d seen with Ryan Reynolds in it (an actor who I quite like)... but a quick check on IMDB reveals a slightly different picture. This is, in fact, his fifth comic book movie. He was in one of the Blade movies... which I’ve not seen but my dad is a big fan of those. He was in RIPD, which I kinda liked and my review is here. He was also Green Lantern, which I loved and reviewed here.  Yeah, I was that guy who liked that movie, so you might want to take anything I say with a pinch of salt from hereon in. The other comic book movie Reynolds was in was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, again another movie which I liked despite its general reception. I reviewed it here but... here’s the thing about that movie. I don’t actually even remember him in it but Ryan Reynolds played Deadpool in that movie too. Something which I just can’t recall but which I’m sure I’ll more than notice next time I pop that movie into the player.

This current variant of Deadpool has a slightly different origin, apparently due to the timeline set up from Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past, which I reviewed here and which I absolutely hated because of the total lack of logic of the starting point from where that movie told its tale. It completely broke continuity with previous films in the series. However, this apparently explains why both Deadpool and Colossus both have some differences to their characters... with Colossus even being played by a different actor.

However, with all this stuff out of the way, is Deadpool a good movie?

Oh yeah.

Like I said, I wasn’t that enamoured of the trailer but the movie itself is an absolute gem. After a quite funny opening title sequence which looks like it could have really been enhanced even more in some kind of 3D release, the film starts off with a battle scene between Deadpool and a load of bad guys which is filled with violence. A lot of the scenes in those trailers were made up from parts of this sequence. Then, just as the old Marvel comics used to do back in the good old days, we get the main character telling you the story of how he arrived at this point and, as the battle continues on, he keeps coming back to it at different points until about two thirds of the way through the narrative, when you’re about caught up on the back story and just why the title character is like he is. This style of getting you hooked on the action and playing ‘catch up’ afterwords is typical of the difference between the way rival companies DC and Marvel used to operate, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, actually. DC were always more linear... Marvel comics made you shift your mindset just a little to accommodate the sequencing.

Now, I said Deadpool, played brilliantly by Ryan Reynolds as some kind of ultra-violent Groucho Marx by way of Bugs Bunny character, tells the audience the story of how he got to this point. Well, he does this by breaking the fourth wall and I believe this is also something that is part of his character in the comics... similar to what John Byrne used to do with his run on The Sensational She-Hulk, I would guess. But when I say he breaks the fourth wall, I don’t mean he does it from time to time... I mean he does it constantly. In fact, he doesn’t break the fourth wall so much as rip it apart with a bulldozer, stamp on it, reassemble it and then kick it some more until he starts bleeding all over the audience... you might want to duck if you’re in the first few rows. And he doesn’t stop at just catching you up with the story... he is talking to the audience constantly, all the way through the movie, and making metatextual references, sometimes at the expense of other characters who are rooted in the narrative.

Slight spoiler in this paragraph: For example, he goes toe to toe with Colossus (played by Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (played brilliantly by someone called Brianna Hildebrand) and, when he goes to the X-Men Mansion for help later in the movie and it’s only the two of them at home, he makes a crack to the audience about the producers only being able to afford these two X-Men for the movie. He does this kind of thing constantly (no, I’m really not going to spoil all the jokes for you here) and you’d really think that this would get kind of old real fast but... it really doesn’t. The movie doesn’t become just one terrible metatextual joke and it’s still able to function as what it’s supposed to be... which is a really fun movie with adult themes. Parents should probably not be trying to sneak their kids into this one, though, I think.

The editing and structural fragmentation keeps everything moving forward in a really breezy and exciting, fast paced way and, once again, Ryan Reynolds proves that he can hold this kind of movie together pretty well when required. Of course, he has absolutely great support from the likes of the aforementioned X-Men, T. J Miller as his buddy, a treacherous Ed Skrein as the main villain (who did so well trying to fill Jason Statham’s shoes in the fourth of The Transporter movies... reviewed here) and the absolutely extraordinary Morena Baccarin as Deadpool’s sexy girlfriend Vanessa. Yeah, that’s right, Inara from Firefly/Serenity is in this and the chemistry between her and Reynolds is just electric.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say on Deadpool, I think. Absolutely brilliant movie which I, surprisingly, enjoyed way more than I thought I would, given my response to the trailers for this one. Definite recommendation from me for anyone who likes seeing characters from the Marvel universe done in a truly entertaining fashion and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do for a sequel to this one, which has already been green lit in Hollywood, it would seem. Looking forward to the ‘harder’ cut on Blu Ray, which is apparently in the works, even more, I would say. Oh, word to the wise, there are a couple of extra scenes right at the end of the credits... well, more like an extra scene and then an extension of that scene hot on the heels of it. So you Marvel fans might want to stick around for that one. Anyway, what the heck? Go see this movie. I had a real blast with it and I hope you do too.

X-Men - Days Of Future Past

Future, Past Caring

X-Men - Days OF Future Past
2014 USA/UK
Directed by Bryan Singer
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers in this one and I’m not even going to apologise for them... this is no more than this dreadful movie deserves to “call it out” to people.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” It’s strange but, I’ve only ever heard that quoted, usually incorrectly (from people who have remembered it wrong), by film-makers trying to defend the outrageous continuity errors evident in their films which their audience has had to point out to them. I have to say that, in terms of the context within which people quote this about their big screen stories, I have to disagree and bring my own inner hobgoblin to the table, in this case.

I believe that a film franchise succeeds or fails on a lot of different factors on a film by film basis but, one of the things which is really important, and which can kill a whole franchise if you let it, is consistency... in this case, the consistency of continuity. And, unfortunately, the X-Men franchise has now, as far as I’m concerned, sacrificed itself for a quick buck on the altar of the hobgoblins who were really only interested in having a good time at the movies but, instead, are forced to hold a mirror up to the movie and say... “Seriously? You think your audience are all this stupid?”

Before I rip into this awful mess properly, I just want you to know how I stand on the previous films in the franchise, so you can see where I’m coming from and judge my thoughts on X-Men: Days Of Future Past (or X-Men: Days Of Screwing The Continuity Even Further While Pretending To Solve It And Hoping Your Audience Doesn’t Think About The Movie For Too Long, as I now call it) so you can either agree or disagree with my thoughts in terms of this movie’s place compared to the others.

X-Men: Bryan Singer’s first movie was pretty much the first movie based on a Marvel comics property that was actually any good. Not just good, pretty damned brilliant, as it happens. It almost made up for not having the proper characters from the 1960s in it and changing the costume design... well... yeah, almost makes up for it. Something to note: Professor X and Magneto built Cerebro together, when they were friends, in this continuity.

X2: X-Men 2: This was at least as good as the first movie. Another brilliant piece of modern fantasy action from Bryan Singer with a strong opening and a strong ending leading into something very dark and with a consistent tone throughout. Basically, an epic feeling movie to set up the Dark Phoenix character arc.

X-Men: The Last Stand: This was awful. Brett Ratner took over the franchise and basically used every great set up from the previous films and managed to make them pretty boring and unwatchable for, pretty much, most of the film. A lot of people haven’t forgiven this movie for being so bad, as far as I can see. Something to note: Young “bald” Professor X and his friend, Young Magneto, go to recruit Jean Grey together. Professor X can both walk and simultaneously use his mutant powers. In this movie, Charles Xavier is killed/disintegrated, although his mind seems to have jumped into a “different” human being... if the post credits sting is anything to go by.

X-Men Origins - Wolverine: A lot of people didn’t dig this movie but I thought it was okay. A lot of fun and very much like an old 1980s or 1990s “straight to video” kind of B Movie.... but with an A Movie budget to play around with. Thought this was much better than the reaction it got. Things to note: Professor X is in this one too, at the end. My review is here.

X-Men: First Class: Absolutely brilliant. Had a lot of continuity errors which could not be explained as a hangover from the previous films but since it was technically a reboot of the franchise, I was happy with this when treated as a stand alone sequence of movies. Things to note: In this timeline, Magneto and Professor X did not build Cerebro. Professor X is crippled by the end of their first big adventure and way after he and Magneto were still friends, confounding the opening of X-Men: The Last Stand totally. My review is here.

The Wolverine: Nice little movie. Not as fun as the last one but different and kinda interesting. Things to note: Wolverine's adamantium claws are severed and are no longer something he has in this “continuity”. Instead, he has reverted back to the bone claws he was born with as a result of the events depicted in this film. Jean Grey haunts his dreams after he killed her in X-Men: The Last Stand. Also, Professor X and Magneto confront Wolverine in an airport in the post credits sting of the movie. Wolverine looks shocked because, obviously, Professor X is dead, isn’t he? At least, his body was destroyed. My review of this one is here.

Okay. Recap over.

So here we have X-Men: Days Of Future Past. And all I wanted from this movie right now is for it to fix all those stupid continuity holes from the clashes between the awful X-Men: The Last Stand and the amazingly cool X-Men: First Class... and in a fairly fun manner, if possible. And, if only the writers would have thought about it a little more, maybe they would even have nailed that because, frankly, while a bit silly, the central premise they use to wipe out the history of the characters in this one really works well... except it fails before they even start using it.

I can see how the idea here was maybe “borrowed” from the rebooted Star Trek films from a couple of years ago. In the first one (reviewed here), the Spock of the regular timeline is catapulted back into his past, which then changes the future of the younger versions of himself and his friends... thus giving the franchise new life to go back to the days of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in their prime for a movie series without having to worry about contradicting anything that came before. Revelling in that, in fact, by having a half remake of Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan for their sequel (reviewed here) and totally having their cake and eating it at the same time. And why the older version of Spock didn’t just wink out of existence because his timeline didn’t actually happen anymore, I’ll never know. Oh, yes I do... because they don’t care about the logic at the heart of the theory of time travel. Okay, whatever.

Singer’s approach in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is to have Wolverine’s “mind” sent back to his younger body in 1973 and get him to change the past then, to split everything off into a new timeline which doesn’t result in the death of mutant kind... and you know what? That could have worked out really well, and the film-makers obviously seem to think it did.. or they never would have released this shambles into cinemas in this form. But the thing is, to have someone sent back from the future to change that timeline... you need to have that future actually be a possibility in the first place. That reality has to have existed before you go back and change it... and there’s no way the point in time that Wolverine is sent back from could actually have happened within the continuity of the previous films without a lot of explaining away of certain things... and there’s absolutely no concession to this, nor concession to audience intelligence, in the movie.

It starts off well enough with concentration camp imagery of imprisoned and dead mutants (and potential mutants) and this is, of course, a nice echo of the World War II Nazi concentration camp sequences which open both the original X-Men and X-Men: First Class. So a really nice idea there from the director. Then we have a fairly cool fight which is basically just a set up to explain the major time travel element  in the film. And then we see the last surviving mutants holed up together, awaiting the coming of the deadly Sentinels. Among these mutants are Kitty Pride, Ice Man, Professor X, Magneto, Storm and Wolverine. They are, of course, the X-Men... well... err... X-Men and X-Women... except... woah... hold on a minute... who’s in that line up again?

I got really excited by the post-credit sting at the end of The Wolverine because the story confronted us with something that was just so impossible within the actual X-Men timeline... Professor X and Wolverine existing in the same continuity after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand... that I figured they must be really confident about undoing the mess they’d made of the consistency between the movies. If they could throw something like that in to be explained away in the next film then... hey... they could do anything.

But that’s the thing, guys and gals. This opening set up is why the whole premise of this movie fails totally. Not only don’t they explain it... they don’t even refer to the events depicted at the end of The Wolverine in any way, shape or form. They just act like the third film didn’t even happen... kinda. Stay with me here because it’s an important concept to get over. Wolverine’s claws in this version of the timeline are back to being adamantium claws. Yep... that’s right... it’s like the events of The Wolverine, released only last year, didn’t even happen. Except... here’s the rub... The Wolverine refers all the way through to Logan’s guilt at having to kill his beloved Jean Grey to save humanity and... err... mutantanity from certain doom. So we know that happened in that continuity. However, in this film, Wolverine also has painful memories of killing Jean Grey (or Dark Phoenix or even, my favourite, Marvel Girl) in that third movie... they actually use clips from it as flashbacks in this one. So then... Professor X is dead isn’t he? This makes no sense. And you can’t try to justify/explain this version as being a version in which the events of the third movie never took place, because they refer to that movie a number of times.

And that’s basically why this movie is screwed before it’s even started. Because the point in time from which our intrepid hero is travelling back from in his mind is absolutely not a reality which could have happened and no attempt is made to explain this. What, they thought we were going to be all overjoyed that most of the old crew were back that we wouldn’t notice the thing has no logic or reason to it at all?

Not only that but, at the end, Wolverine’s mind snaps back to the version of himself fifty years later in a timeline we haven’t seen and all his memories of those fifty years are replaced by his old ones (which is why he’s astonished to see people like Jean Grey and Cyclops back in his timeline). This also makes no sense... his mind didn’t have anywhere else to snap back to... his timeline was destroyed. Serious clangers all round here folks.

Okay, so now I’ve reiterated why the film just totally falls apart and screws the entire franchise sideways into a cocked, adamantium hat... what’s the movie like apart form the huge plot holes?

Well... it’s kinda okayish, in some ways. It’s got a good buzz about it early on but, ultimately, it all just felt a bit “by the numbers”. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry and Ellen Page were all fine... but that was it for them. They were all just fine... and who can blame them in some ways. Their dialogue wasn’t exactly special. Ditto for most of the First Class team. Michael Fassbender is always damned watchable but he honestly didn’t seem to be present in most of his scenes, apart from when he loses it at Charles Xavier on the plane... that was pretty good. Jennifer Lawrence’s take on Raven/Mystique was okay too but she’s flying more or less solo in this one and, although she’s a bit of a stand out character, she’s mostly just seen beating people up.

James MacAvoy is fantastic and just like his Xavier character in X-Men: First Class. Absolutely a consistent and brilliant performance. However, asides from the cool acting, theres another basic continuity problem with this one. We saw him crippled at the end of the last movie but, in this one, Hank/The Beast has made him a serum which gives him his legs back every time he has his fix. However, this also has the side effect of relieving him of his mutant powers... further highlighting the absolute impossibility of the opening sequence of X-Men: The Last Stand as a path from this reality... except we know all that must have happened because Wolverine’s mind was just sent back from that future reality. Not very well thought out, is it? It’s like the writers kept painting themselves into a corner and then were trying to distract you with things to cover up the fact that they couldn’t address the issues this throws up. But hey, who cares, the audience won’t be paying attention will they? Um, whatever dudes.

There were some other nice things about the movie. The idea that Magneto was implicated in the murder of JFK but was actually trying to save him because he was a fellow mutant was nice. Some, not all, of the action sequences were nicely handled too, the really good ones being the opening fight scene and the sequence where Quicksilver saves them all in the Pentagon jailbreak scene. Which is a pretty great scene... except... oops. Now that’s another confusing thing for audiences who don’t understand that the rights to certain Marvel characters reside with more than one company...

So here you have Quicksilver who is played by Evan Peters in X-Men: Days Of Future Past.... which is a Marvel/20th Century Fox picture. However, we just saw him portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the first mid-credits sting at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (reviewed here), made by Marvel/Disney, and will see him portraying that character again in The Avengers: Age Of Ultron next year, also for Marvel/Disney. What’s worse is, the 20th Century Fox version of the character and the Marvel/Disney version of the character are not allowed to share the same history, The ones locked into the S.H.I.E.L.D timeline is not even allowed to mention “mutation” apparently. This is going to confuse a hell of a lot of audience members who don’t know the ins and outs of the situation, folks. All they’re going to know is you’ve got the same character played by two different actors with contradicting histories co-existing at the same time in cinema history. Probably not a great idea guys.

Okay, what else. Well, the music is okay. This one marks the first time that an X-Men movie has had the same composer twice and John Ottman’s score here reuses the X-Men theme he used for X-Men 2. Wait, what? Yeah, you can see the problem here, right? Even the music is, for one of the few rare times in a Marvel movie, insisting on a continuity which is already shot to hell. Which is a shame because Ottman’s score does the job here. It’s not as cool as his earlier X-Men 2 score, or even his two Fantastic Four scores, but it does it’s job and I’ll be grabbing a copy when the CD comes out in a couple of weeks.

And... what else? Um... the special effects are okay, if you like that kind of thing, and the film is competently shot and edited. So, some nice work there... but none of this goes anywhere near making up for the fact that this movie screws up the continuity even worse than X-Men: First Class did.

When the four sequels to Universal’s The Mummy were released in the 1940s, these sequels formed what was supposed to be a single continuity. However, some of the films took place decades after the previous one and in all that time, they were all set in contemporary America, give or take a few years. Worse, in one film, Kharis The Mummy gets buried in a swamp in one country and, when he rises from the swamp to live again in the next movie, it’s somehow relocated to another country. Now, it’s my belief that the majority of those 1940s audiences didn’t question these huge plot holes because, frankly, these were the decades well before anything like commercial home video viewing could even be imagined and re-release cinema screenings were less of a thing then. The movie played, you saw it, and it wasn’t until commercial television started out in the 1950s that these movies would get shown enough again to be able to spot stuff like this. However, note to people in Hollywoodland expecting a gullible audience to swallow the scripts they turn out with more holes in them than a Swiss cheese... your audience is no longer living in the 1940s. It’s not like somebody isn’t going to notice all this stuff somewhere along the line. You need to write smarter than this!

When I went to buy a ticket for X-Men: Days Of Future Past, for a performance a few hours later, there were a lot of firemen in the cinema and when I got to the front of the queue I was told that they were only giving out refunds. It turns out the cinema in question had been struck by lightning less than ten minutes before I’d arrived and it had knocked all the projection rooms out. When I tried again a few hours later, they’d literally just managed to get the cinema rebooted up and were selling tickets again. All I can say is... I should have taken this as some kind of omen, maybe? X-Men: Days Of Future Past is my joint, least favourite X-Men movie, tying with X-Men: The Last Stand in last place. This was not how I was hoping the latest film in a, mostly, fairly strong film series would play out and the only audience I could possibly recommend this to is an audience who haven’t seen any of the previous movies in the franchise because, honestly, this one just makes no sense. And it’s such a shame. It feels like Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (reviewed here) all over again. It just didn’t address the issues it needed to address... and these directors/writers/producers need to make a smarter product to keep the percentage of their audience interested in these things satisified, I’m afraid to say. The hobgoblins are loose... and their small minds are out to tear apart your inconsistencies.

The Wolverine 3D (X-Men 6)

Ronin Around

The Wolverine 3D (X-Men 6)
2013 USA
Directed by James Mangold
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: There will be some big spoilers slicing 
away at you in this one. Approach with caution.

You know, I really quite like the X-Men movie franchise, even though it’s nothing like The Uncanny X-Men I used to read very occasionally as a kid. I used to read the odd British reprint in the very early 70s, harking back to the early 60s (in fact, I think I read the first few issues of the original series) which was many years before the creation of the super-group’s most popular member, Wolverine (or Weapon X as I believe he used to be known, back in the days when he was kind of a villain?). To me the characters were Professor X, Beast, Cyclops, Iceman and Marvel Girl (now better known by her civilian moniker of Jean Grey). They were the X-Men I wanted to see back when they brought the first movie out 13 years ago.

However, I really liked that movie and, of the five previous films in the franchise, the only one which let me down big time and made me curse the internal politics of the Hollywood suits who, by all accounts, deliberately waited for the original director of the first two to leave the production, was X-Men: The Last Stand (X-Men 3). That particular entry into the franchise was a) not their last stand, clearly and b) really quite rubbish. Especially since the original film's writing/directing team had beautifully set up the Dark Phoenix plot from the comics so brilliantly with the death of Jean Grey at the end of the second film... hinting at the continuation with a “held” camera shot panning across a lake. Everybody knew Marvel Girl would be resurrected as a dark villainess destroyer like she was in the comics and everyone was so psyched to see what would happen next. Unfortunately the change of director meant that the Dark Phoenix fulfillment story became relegated to a minor plot point in the third movie... which was a real mis-step for the franchise (but don’t worry, I’m reminding you of all this for a reason pertinent to this review).

When X-Men Origins: Wolverine burst onto our screen, my impression was that nobody was that interested in the X-Men anymore. The disappointment of that previous movie had kind of killed off the audience it seems to me. However, I went to see it and really quite liked it (my review of it is here). It wasn’t a perfect movie but it did feel like a modernish b-movie in terms of the fun of the way it was put together. Kind of like an early to mid 80s straight-to-home-video release but with a bigger budget thrown at it. It kinda worked on the level it was going for and, like I said, it had some fun in it.

The fifth X-Men movie, X-Men:First Class (reviewed here) was a bit of a strange prequel. It had stuff happening in it which totally contradicted the events which were flashed back to in the third X-Men film, as though the powers that be wanted to completely forget that third mis-step and reboot the series. Except it couldn’t be a reboot because there were a couple of interesting actor/character cameos in that film and... to be honest... this movie totally screws any continuity with the previous installments in the series. That it was so successful at the box office is because of one thing alone... it’s a completely brilliant, kick ass movie which succeeds on nearly every level and rivals the first two movies in every way. Such a brilliant, if continuity challenged movie.

Now, stick with me if you’re finding all this continuity stuff interesting because there’s a sequence at the end of The Wolverine which directly links it into the other parts of the franchise and sets up the new movie, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, currently filming, which combines the casts from the original X-Men movies and X-Men: First Class... I’ll come back to all this towards the end of this review.

And so, here we have Hugh Jackman’s sixth time playing Logan (Wolverine) on film. He’s a character who, as we know from previous movies, can heal himself very quickly and, because of this, has lived many hundreds of years (along with his brother who was cursed with the same talent/misfortune). We also know about his adamantium skeleton and we know that even before he had this technology thrust upon him, he had bone claws which would emerge at will from his knuckles. We also know that Hugh Jackman, a fan of the character, turned out to be completely perfect casting and plays him with the seriousness and gravitas that a fan-favourite character of this magnitude requires. So we know nothing is going to be wrong about his performance here and, what do you know, he’s still perfect in the role. And from hereon in, this review gets spoilery people!

This film is an adaptation of the 1982 comic-book 4 issue mini series The Wolverine, by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. I’ve not read that and can’t tell you whether it’s a completely faithful adaptation or not but this film certainly feels like it was adapted from something. It’s got a lot of substance to it and is not, contrary to what the trailers will have you believe, just a load of action sequences strung together. In fact, the action sequences in this were the ones which left me a little disappointed, to be honest. I found them a trifle long winded at times but, frankly, it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of a beautifully put together movie. Logan’s relationship with the two lead Asian actresses in the film is really quite wonderful and, as always, Jackman makes you believe in the character through his sheer lack of sociability and resignedness and the way that vibe bounces off of friend and foe alike is a sheer delight to watch.

There are also some nice shot compositions, especially the first shot where the World War II Japanese concentration camp is established, which works particularly well in 3D when it pans to the right of the shot. And really nice set ups during the period when Logan is staying with a character called Mariko at her private hideaway, which play with size and perspective in a really nice way, pitching extremes of size directly against each other in the same shot for some nice angular and sometimes, triangular designs.

There's a really silly slip up, though, during that last mentioned set of sequences. There's a scene at a dinner table where much attention is drawn to the positioning of chopsticks and, well, all I can say is it's the mystery of the bizarrely moving chopsticks from horizontal position to vertical position again. Now this can have happened in two ways. One is that the dinner conversation was originally much longer and the chopsticks were "reset" during that conversation but then the sequence was shortened in the editing and that part cut out. Frankly though, because your attention is drawn towards the offending culinary objects, the slip up is quite blatant. I think what might have happened is the final shot which finishes the sequence off, a shot which has no conversation in it and which includes the problem, may have been spliced onto the end from an alternate take of an earlier shot to have something in medium shot to finish the sequence off... either way, the effect is quite comical and perhaps a little unwanted.

Plus some interesting choices in continuity with the rest of the franchise and this is where it gets interesting since The Wolverine is also, it turns out, a direct sequel to X-Men: The Last Stand. Haunted by the spirit of Jean Grey, who he had to kill in her Dark Phoenix incarnation in that film, Logan has a fair few dream-like conversations with her throughout this movie (Jean Grey again played remarkably charismatically by Famke Janssen) in a sort of The Ghost And Mrs. Muir kind of existence (or younger readers might take the analogy of Six and Baltar in the modern incarnation of the Battlestar Galactica TV series, if they prefer). This works pretty well to add a certain amount of depth to the character and explains the almost nomadic existence he has been living since the events in that third film. Also, it makes sense to link it with that movie in some ways because the events in X-Men Origins: Wolverine were clearly taking place at a point before the first X-Men movie and don’t require this film to tie up any loose “character” ends from that film.

This movie plays out really well though and, all in all, it’s quite extreme and raw for the rating... although nowhere near as extreme as I would have liked and had hoped for when director Darren Aronofsky was originally attached to the project in its early days. Well, okay, it’s raw for “modern” Hollywood anyway, and we can’t help but be trapped in the censorially worse-than-Victorian culture we are living in at the moment, I guess.

The score by Marco Beltrami, who is the 6th composer to work on an X-Men film (so much for musical continuity between films, you idiot producers) is actually quite mellow but not as pseudo-Japanese style as I was expecting. Perhaps that would, to be honest, have been a wrong move and this score supports the drama quite well. I’ve no idea as yet whether it works as well as a stand alone listen because I was only able to sneak enough time in to listen to the first third of the album over the week before I saw the movie, but I’m guessing it’s a nice enough listen and Beltrami’s a solid composer.

Now then... you will have hopefully seen this movie by now and if you did, I sincerely hope you stayed for the mid-credits epilogue sequence. If you didn’t, well, maybe you should try to see it. There’s been a lot of complaints, including from myself, that the last X-Men film brought about so many impossible continuity errors that it just made a mockery of the series. Now Bryan Singer, the original director of the first two movies in the franchise, who is making the next one, has said that he has recognised this and will try to do something about it. Now, they’re doing Days Of Future Past and all the actors who played the characters in both sets of movies, are reuniting to play the same characters at different points in time, presumably at the same time - Professor X meet young Professor X etc... but I don’t see how any of that can reunite the two timelines unless, one of the timelines is significantly altered. Now, the post end credits sequence on the third movie implied that the mind of Professor X had somehow survived in someone else’s body but, if I recall correctly, both Professor X and Magneto, played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, were destroyed. With me so far? Okay...

The mid end credits sequence in The Wolverine is set two years after the events that take place in the main body of the movie. There, at an airport, an uncredited Ian McKellan as Magneto and an uncredited Patrick Stewart as Professor X try to enlist Logan’s aid. Logan is suitably baffled by their presence, and so are the audience. Also, the implication could be that even Jean Grey somehow survived and that’s why she is always in Logan’s head throughout this movie (okay, so that last might just be wishful thinking on my part but, what the heck?). However, this does give me hope for the future of the franchise because, if Singer is able to come up with a good reason for Magneto and Professor X to still be walking the earth, then surely the continuity errors from the last movie should be small enough in comparison for him to take care of. Let’s hope so anyway. I guess we’ll find out during May 2014, which is when X-Men: Days Of Future Past is due to be released.

Until then, enjoy The Wolverine. It’s not as fun as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, to be sure, but it’s certainly got a more mature feel to it and a lot more narrative and character development to get your head around. And Jackman is always good to watch as Logan, bringing a lot to the role and embedding it with a continuity in character attitude that elevates the role to being one of the great on-screen characters of our time. He even gets away with doing a quite blatant homage to James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever... and if you've seen that film then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Don’t miss out, bub!