10 Famous Movies That Screwed Up The Most Important Part
10. X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Mutant Favorites
It must be hard being a fancy pants Hollywood executive in charge of a superhero franchise as popular and wide-reaching in canon as X-Men. The fan base is rabid, obsessed with seeing their favorite characters like Gambit or Cable or Bishop represented on screen, and they better be awesome or else expect angry e-mails. There's continuity to consider, as fans are just as rabid about things making sense logicially as they are about the exciting mutant action. So when it came to making a stand-alone X-Men movie that took place primarily in the past and directly tied into the start of the first X-Men flick, the landmines were numerous and well-obscured. But somehow X-Men: Origins Wolverine fell on every single one. Cheesy effects, continuity questions regarding the nature of Wolverine's claws prior to his getting adamantium, crucial plot details being provided following a comedic boxing match with The Blob, and the less said this movie's chilly relationship with the laws of physics, the better. To say this movie had no idea what it was doing would be an insult to people without brains. For example, It's hard to think of a more boneheaded decision than putting the zip on the 'Merc with a mouth', Deadpool. While comics are comics and no character is truly ever dead, by the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Deadpool has had his mouth sewed shut, head chopped off, and the laser beams from that now severed head's eyes collapsing a giant smoke stack on top of his now lifeless corpse. Yeah, safe to say that's not the best way to introduce a wise-cracking fan favourite to mainstream audiences. Worse, Ryan Reynolds had been desperate to play that character, is a 'real life' comic book fan, and would have done a bang up job of it. Gambit gets a bit of a better rub, but again isn't introduced in any way that makes his character dynamic or memorable unless you were already a fan, in which case you'd hope for more character development. There's also the really strange subplot involving the kidnapping of all the mutants we saw in previous flicks, which immediately takes you out of the movie as you try to do the math on how old each of those characters would be in the first X-men movie if this one took place in 1975. Ultimately X-Men Origins: Wolverine, failed at its one job. The FREAKING X-MEN. The cool characters felt lame, the supposedly throwaway characters or lesser known ones felt the most 'real' (Will.i.am's John Wraith is admittedly great), and the whole thing just reeks of a bunch of guys in a back room somewhere throwing darts at a giant cork-board with action-figure sales numbers, hitting a target, and writing the script from there. It was a disservice to the fans, sure, but they have other movies to see, the real tragedy is in how this movie ruined characters we may never now never see again.
