For a radically different look at Wolverine, check out J.P. Mangalindan's review by clicking here, or just keep reading after Michael's.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Screw the haters: Wolverine rocks.

It's funny how past installments of a franchise can alter your perception of the new one. Up until Brett Ratner's hack job on X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men was known as a "good" comic book franchise. Critics and audiences alike praised the first two. X2: X-Men United is still my favorite comic book movie of all time.

But then Fox set a summer 2006 release date for Last Stand, and refused to push it back after the original director on the movie, Matthew Vaughn, dropped out. Instead, they hired Ratner, the guy from the Rush Hour movies, knowing that he would do whatever he was told and bring the movie in on time. The screenplay needed a few more revisions, but why spend money waiting for writers to do their thing when we're on a deadline? Even in the final movie, it feels like you're watching an unpolished draft.

The movie, on the strength of X2, opened big. But the X-Men franchise was tainted, downgraded from an Iron Man-style success story to a Fantastic Four-style cash-in.

So ever since Fox announced their decision to make a Wolverine spin-off origin movie, the press has skewed negative. Fox is going to screw it up again. They don't have respect for the franchise. They're milking the franchise dry. Rumors of director Gavin Hood (who did the South African crime drama Tsotsi) getting into fights with Fox head Tom Rothman didn't help, nor did the recent internet leak. (Quick: thousands of web geeks watch a cut of Wolverine on their computer screens with hundreds of special effects shots unfinished. What's the reaction going to be?)

Conventional wisdom would seem to be that since Wolverine is monumentally better than Last Stand, it should be warmly received. But my theory is that it actually would've gotten a better critical response had it been released after X2 -- back when X-Men was still a "good" franchise.

Because now that it's not, critics and audiences are going in expecting not to like it. And here's a little secret about critics: sometimes without even realizing it, they decide their opinion of a movie before they see it. If Wolverine had followed X2, they'd be going in expecting another installment of a franchise that's O.K. to like. But it didn't, and because of Last Stand, they went in with vastly different perceptions of how good a movie Wolverine could be.

Last Stand, in other words, created a subtle domino effect that resulted in the current negative perception of Wolverine.

Okay. So now that I've blasted every movie critic in the world and blamed everything on Brett Ratner, what did I think of Wolverine?

I thought it was a cool, fun movie ...