Batter or Worse: CAUGHT STEALING

Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is atypical for him since it’s shorn of self-conscious ambition. He’s a filmmaker usually loaded down with style while straining for abstractions and existential metaphor. When it works it works. Consider the Biblical fantasy of Noah or epic existential time-spanning sci-fi The Fountain or the panicked pressure-cooker allegory of mother! or the twirling mirrored ballet nightmare of Black Swan. He’s an energetic image-maker, expert at enveloping with consistent mood and getting committed performances out of talented casts. For better and worse, there are no small choices in an Aronofsky film. The hysteria of his addiction dramas, the manic druggy Requiem for a Dream and doom-laden overeating of The Whale, is maddeningly misjudged. But the jumpy intensity of the grit and grain to his character drama The Wrestler is intensely focused. When his choices hit, they hit hard; otherwise they’re painful wild swings that totally miss. So it’s fun to see his newest feature be his breeziest and least burdened by weighty themes. It’s an up-tempo, low-level thriller set on the streets of New York City. It’s 1998 and an alcoholic ex-baseball player (Austin Butler) is barely making it work as a bartender with a nice girlfriend (Zoe Kravitz). Too bad, then, that he makes the mistake of agreeing to watch a pet cat for his punk neighbor (Matt Smith). This gets him caught between competing drug dealing gangsters (Bad Bunny and some Russians on one side; Hasidic Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber on the other) who think the punk left him a clue to their cash. 

It sets off a mad, darkly funny, increasingly violent scramble to get out of trouble. Not even a weary cop (Regina King) seems much help. He’ll have to do it himself. Butler makes such a fine, sympathetic presence at the center of the tension. He’s stepped confidently into leading man mode, using his physicality to get and hold attention in the frame with an easy charm and casual energy that’s somehow both perfectly posed and totally relaxed. Now there’s a Movie Star. He holds the center easily as the thriller plotting pops off around him. Aronofsky gives it all a hurtling momentum, like a madcap After Hours take (there’s even Griffin Dunne) on the kind of scrappy, chatty, irreverent post-Tarantino thrillers that would’ve been on screens in 1998. Now that’s commitment to period accuracy. It’s a movie of small choices with big effects: the crack of a bat to bring our lead out of a recurring nightmare; an affinity for elegant long tracking shots; a well-spun collection of needle drops; a steady teetering between lighthearted eccentric characterizations and heavy deadly twists and turns. The movie has speed on its side; the thing doesn’t feel thin until the credits have ended and you’re walking back to the parking lot. If it’s ultimately just glossy genre pulpiness for the sake of it, then at least it’s done with such a high level of confident skill. I could get used to this style of Aronofsky. 

Doomsday Schleppers: THE 5TH WAVE

The 5th Wave is the latest young adult apocalyptic dystopia of the week. It gets its name from the final stage of the most convoluted and absurd alien invasion plot this side of Ed Wood. Wave 1: shutting off the planet’s power. Wave 2: sending tsunamis crashing into every coast. Wave 3: spreading bird flu everywhere. Wave 4: flying drones and sending out snipers. It seems like any one of those waves could’ve been sufficient to take out the entire human race, but these unseen alien beings either haven’t planned well or are deliberately toying with us. Or maybe they just like echoing Biblical plagues. Who am I to say? The movie tears through these initial waves, any one of which could be an entire disaster movie, with such quickly paced table-setting glossiness that it forgets to find the impact. It’s in a rush to get to the 5th wave: convincing the surviving humans to lose hope and do themselves in.

Per subgenre dictates, we start with a normal teenager, this time a pretty blonde high school senior (Chloe Grace Moretz). Then, soon enough, generic sci-fi elements clear the way for a scenario in which adults are either powerless or domineering and only teenagers can save the day. If you think this sounds like any number of post-Hunger Games knockoffs, you’re right. This one starts with a smidge of interesting thought, transmogrifying senioritis’ valedictory lap finality into an end-of-the-world metaphor, and then quickly descends into popcorn nihilism and cotton candy platitudes. It’s unusually violent for this sort of tween thing – rampant gun brandishing, bloodless sprays of bullets, and roiling catastrophes, as well as gooey close-up impromptu surgeries. And, though its story goes down some moderately weird side roads on the way to predictable beats, it all too rarely comes to life.

Moretz, despite being very good in a variety of roles (from Carrie to Clouds of Sils Maria) and the star driving this vehicle, is shunted to the side for a good portion of the film. Separated from her father (Ron Livingston) and searching for her little brother (Zackary Arthur), she ends up recuperating in a farmhouse after a mysterious hunk (Alex Roe) rescues her. It’s instant romantic tension. Meanwhile, her brother is stuck in a military compound where Liev Schreiber and Maria Bello are training kids to combat the aliens who have begun latching themselves onto human hosts, Body Snatchers style. At this boot camp we find adorable moppets wielding military-grade firearms and enduring war movie montages. A few older kids are there, too, including It Follows’ Maika Monroe, stealing ever scene she’s in with rebellious charisma, Jurassic World’s Nick Robinson as a mopey hero, and Grand Budapest Hotel’s Tony Revolori as a guy nicknamed Dumbo. Imagine Nicholas Sparks rewrote They Live as a Maze Runner prequel (no politics, more forced sentiment and jumbled mythology) and you’re on the right track. So, yeah, it’s a little weirder than I’d expected.

It’s almost admirably unexpected in the way director J Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed), from a screenplay adapted from Rick Yancey’s book by Susannah Grant (In Her Shoes), Akiva Goldsman (Insurgent), and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2), ghoulishly churns through large scale (and only partially convincing) calamities to get to the smallest possible scenes where two young people stare at each other in the woods. It discards the waves of alien threats for close moments between teens stuck in the wilderness, or isolated in a child soldier factory. That could be an intriguing small look at a bigger picture, but is instead an uninvolving and weightless perspective. The immediate stakes are so simple – brother and sister need to be reunited – and the larger stakes – saving the planet – are written off as impossible. What a strange mix of brutal conditions and mushy execution, harsh bruising nastiness and gushing sentiment. Overly clean and bright photography throws its artificiality and small thinking into dull obviousness.

That’s what’s ultimately so unsatisfying about The 5th Wave. It strands a good cast in a movie that could’ve really popped with evocative metaphor and a harrowing concept, but fails to really reckon with the implications of its premise, glossing over moral dilemmas. Sure, it features our lead killing an innocent man (we see the same moment twice, even) and a twist that complicates easy morality, but these ideas remain half-buried in the slick formula. Heavy ideas, up to and including the end of the world and the deaths (or potential thereof) of everyone they love, are merely used for superficial weight holding down the edges of a premise so flimsy it threatens to blow away right before our very eyes. By the ending, which resolves the immediate conflicts through convenient luck, then coasts to a limp cliffhanger, I nearly forgot why I had bothered to care in the first place.

Let it Shine: SPOTLIGHT

Unadorned filmmaking of burnished and unobtrusive professional polish, Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight is a good example of how little you have to do to create an absorbing movie, provided you have the right story and the right cast. Writer-director McCarthy, who, when not being a terrific character actor, spends his time making nice small character dramas (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win Win), takes for his material here the true story of the Boston Globe’s 2001 investigation into allegations of child abuse committed by Catholic priests which resulted in a detailed and powerful series of exposés. He, with co-writer Josh Singer (The West Wing), turns this into a movie about people simply doing their jobs, removing all narrative adornments a more conventionally crowd-pleasing picture would require: artificial drama, character arcs, a main character, grand pronouncements, easy symbolism, cheap moralizing. Instead he simply shows us an ensemble of journalists working studiously and methodically, making sure they get the facts right before going to print. They know they’re onto something big, a story of massive importance and moral imperative, but it’s also just their job.

The result of McCarthy’s approach is an inspirational story about journalism at its finest boiled down to tense scenes of research, interviews, and fact checking. This is a procedural about workaday reporters doing the best they can, a movie committed to being something like an accurate portrayal of the daily grind of a noble profession done right. The Globe’s editors (Liev Schreiber, John Slattery) task the in-depth investigative reporting “Spotlight” team (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d’Arcy James) to take a closer look at a small court case involving a tenacious lawyer (Stanley Tucci) suing the local Catholic Archdiocese on behalf of clients who were abused by priests. As the reporters track down sources and gather archival background information, they discover a pattern of priests pulled from parishes under suspicious circumstances and quietly reassigned. It’s a clue that something’s rotten, and as a number of victims agree to interviews, it’s clear they’re about to uncover a devastating conspiracy of abuse and cover-ups, staggering in scope, heartbreaking in depth.

Every step of the way, these men and women make sure to get every detail right, to ensure the story is airtight. They’re working in secret, trying to avoid raising the suspicions of local Catholic officials who form an integral part of Boston’s civic and philanthropic society. Some lawyers for the church (Billy Crudup, Jamey Sheridan) are suspicious, refusing even to corroborate basic details. As the undeniable facts of the case start to add up, the journalists are even more driven to follow facts, beyond assumptions or pre-existing worldviews, into the simple, pure, disturbing truth. McCarthy simply sits back and lets the actors go to work in a movie of conversations – cautious interviews, heated arguments, tense debates, tricky negotiations – as the reporters struggle to get a handle on the story’s reach and implications, as well as deciding how best to break the news to the people. It’s unshowy. The blocking is simple, the editing briskly functional, the photography bright and clean. The filmmaking is so uninsistent, Howard Shore’s score, which would seem sparse in any other film, sounds overbearing. The focus is only on process.

The performers are subtle, natural, inhabiting real people whose day jobs are a combination of craft and calling. Keaton sinks into a tired newsman’s humble fortitude, McAdams carries quiet confidence, Ruffalo leans into inquisitive doggedness, and d’Arcy James wears sturdy moral force. There are no heroes, just normal people patiently doing what they must to root out hidden facts. Here’s a movie about nothing more than the value of a job well done. The job in this case just happens to be one that uncovered one of the most significant news stories of this century. A telling moment comes when September 11, 2001 rolls around, sending the newsroom scrambling in the wake of that day’s tragedy. It pushes the Spotlight team’s work on the backburner, and yet McCarthy treats this huge moment of recent history as a background detail. It’s a moment of world-changing impact, sensitively and appropriately somber in its portrayal, but the decades of spiritual and sexual abuse uncovered by their investigation is just as monumental.

Aside from one poignant montage set to “Silent Night,” featuring what has to be cinema’s most moving and upsetting Excel spreadsheet-making scene, the movie doesn’t push buttons. It speaks as clearly and directly as its characters, knowing the details will speak for themselves. It knows the actors are dialed-in to both the import of their characters’ jobs and the processes of doing them. It has faith in the inherent compelling nature of carefully piecing together a news story, trying to be fair to subjects, and do right by the people of the world by telling the truth. Spotlight may not be quite as richly rewarding a cinematic experience as other great newspaper movies like All the President’s Men and Zodiac, but it belongs on the same Journalism 101 syllabus. Scene by scene, line by line, McCarthy finds a quietly gripping approach, building to a low-key finale both triumphant and daunting. The article has gone to print. But the work continues.

Backstairs at the White House: THE BUTLER

In The Butler, director Lee Daniels recreates the Civil Rights movement in the guise of stirringly personal melodrama. A key scene revolves around the dinner table of a middle class black family in Washington D.C some time in 1968. The Freedom Rider son snipes at his parents when they express admiration for Sidney Poitier. He’s breaking down barriers, they say. He’s doing so by “acting white,” their son snaps. How thrilling it is to see this conversation play out not only on the big screen, but in a big, star-studded Hollywood film that’s for once seriously interested in the 50s, 60s, and 70s from the perspective of African American lives without feeling the need to hedge bets and shoehorn in a white perspective or reduce the black experience of the period into talking points and homogenous unity. That the film is messy and ungainly in many respects is only an outgrowth of its seriousness of intent, the depth of its inquisitive mournfulness, and the commitment it has to wrangling differing viewpoints into a sweeping, decades-spanning story of one man’s humble job as one of many butlers in the White House.

That man is Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker). Born to sharecroppers in the Deep South in the 1920s, he witnessed the death of his father at the hands of a snarling white farmer. Once grown, he leaves to find work, eventually ending up in a prestigious Washington, D.C. hotel. From there he’s eventually invited to interview for a position on the staff of the White House during the Eisenhower administration. He’s hired as a butler, a position he will keep for over thirty years and seven presidents. Whitaker, appearing meek and small in his broad frame, moves deliberately. He plays a man who takes great pride in his job and finds great success in it, moving between the backstage world of the house, chatting with his black colleagues (Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz) in back rooms before putting on unrevealing public faces to walk out into the Oval Office and state dinners alike, ready to serve at a moment’s notice. If it weren’t for the politics half-overheard, the news on the TVs and radio, and the changing fashions, one gets a sense that Cecil could very well stay in this job and let the 20th century pass him by.

Yet that’s a choice he cannot make for himself. He’s a part of the times whether he wants to be or not. Cecil’s wife (Oprah Winfrey) is introduced in a scene that finds her commiserating with great sadness about the death of Emmett Till. The turbulence of the Civil Rights movement is inescapable. Soon, his oldest son (David Oyelowo, in a great performance that takes his character from a teenager to a middle-aged man) becomes a civil rights fighter, allowing the film some stirring cross-cutting between the butler’s daily tasks and the most notable moments of the civil rights struggle, none more powerful than the banquet juxtaposed against a lunch counter sit-in. His son becomes a more socio-politically honest Forrest Gump, a first-hand eyewitness to history at every turn, but full of agency and conviction that leads him there. He’s a driver of events, not a mere spectator, to sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and Black Panthers, even at one point sitting in a Birmingham jail cell down the row from where Martin Luther King Jr. would be writing his famous letter.

It’s the tensions in this father-son relationship that drive a good chunk of the film, a reflection of divides within America and within the African American community. The son has an approach to current events that often clashes with the accommodating, personal views of the various administrations that his father often has. As the volatile 60s curdle into the 70s, Cecil simply can’t ignore the situations unfolding around him. The political is undoubtedly and inescapably personal. As he moves with a tray of refreshments into the background in rooms of power, where white men make decisions about race while the black man walks silently through the scene, it’s an image that’s oft repeated and makes quiet points about the nature of power and access to true understanding about racial issues. When a white politician ruminates about what should be done about “Negro problems,” no one even seems to notice the black butler silently slipping out of the room. There’s rich subtext here about the variety of ways racial barriers are both erected and chipped away.

The march of presidents and the march of cameos playing them is at once broad and matter-of-fact. It’s a feast of over-cooked accent work, wigs and sculpted putty noses and jowls. Through Eisenhower (Robin Williams), Kennedy (James Marsden), Johnson (Liev Schreiber), Nixon (John Cusack), and Reagan (Alan Rickman) – Ford and Carter are left for file footage to portray – Cecil works in close proximity to men of power and historical interest. But they’re never more than broad sound bites and brief impressions in Danny Strong’s screenplay. They may be important people, but they are the least convincing aspect of the film. Similarly, the Big Events of the era pass by with the flatly unimaginative, albeit dramatically effective, progression of a history report. The Butler is best in scenes of loose and unhurried interactions between characters of middle- and working-class: the butlers, neighbors (like Terrence Howard), and students (like Yaya Dacosta). This becomes a film not about a man and the presidents he served, but about a man and his family, buffeted by the course of history while entangled in their own interpersonal dramas.

Lee Daniels, a hammy director if there ever was one, makes bold and oftentimes inexplicable choices. After two terribly nutso productions (Shadowboxer and The Paperboy) and an overdetermined miserabilist drama (Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire), he’s found the most purpose and focus he’s yet been able to muster while still retaining his always interesting personality. He’s the kind of director who’d rather fail trying something unexpected than play it safe. That’s why, even when it may be hard to enjoy one of his films, it’s rarely easy to dismiss it entirely. He starts The Butler with a shot of two lynched black men dangling from a tree, an American flag waving in the background, while a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. fades up on the side of the image. It’s stark and startling, butting up against our first look at Forest Whitaker dressed for duty and sitting in a White House corridor before flashing back to his childhood. Right away, Daniels tells us his intent to show us the life of a man against the backdrop of larger historical and symbolic concerns. And yet the movie works both erratically and well for keeping the larger concerns confined to the background, flavoring without taking over, only erupting when they most directly intersect with the lives of the butler and his family. It’s like Eyes on the Prize plays out as a backdrop for one family’s quintessentially 60s and 70s problems.

This causes for some strained and wandering filmmaking that at worst keeps context a mere dusting, but at best finds rich resonances, especially in the two lead performances. Whitaker’s steady, wise, slowly evolving portrayal of a quietly strong man is a great anchor. It’s a deceptively static performance that gathers unexpected riches the longer the film rolls. Winfrey, for her part, is a dynamic presence on screen. Decades of her status as talk show royalty have clouded the public’s memory of her real and genuine qualities as an actress. She has boundless charisma and incredible emotional force. Here she’s playing a woman who loves her husband deeply and truly, but doesn’t stop gathering tensions and jealousies, great disappointments and great pride. She loves her family and her life and yet still wishes for more. As her character gathers struggles of her own, Winfrey plays a symphony of melodrama, compelling all the way. One of my favorite scenes in the film finds her dancing alone to Soul Train in a scene that starts endearingly silly and eventually finds its way to sudden funk-scored tragedy. In another she drunkenly drawls superficial questions about Jackie Kennedy (in her state she pronounces it “Jackée”), digging for gossip from her placid husband’s steadfast commitment to confidentiality. What works best about the film is how Whitaker and Winfrey’s performances contain unspoken conflicts and resolutions that sneak past the film’s sometimes-overdetermined messaging and heavy-handed narration. 

The film goes this way and that as emotions and ages make leaps and bounds. The film is overstuffed, overflowing with dramatic points of interest and subplots that surge, take over, and fade away to maybe return again. It’s the kind of film that is directed in five or six directions at once, square and impressionistic, corny and evocative, comedic and deadly serious. Daniels stages Big National Events loudly and emphatically while personal and political scenes play tenderly and with ellipsis. I particularly enjoyed a very small, slowly simmering subplot between Winfrey and Howard that fleetingly feels like a cousin to Wong Kar Wai by way of Douglas Sirk. Daniels is a director who works not only with melodrama, but also with an awareness of a variety of types of melodrama. It’s a film of resonant surface detail and deeply moving implications. It doesn’t all fit together, but that’s part of what makes it compelling. This isn’t a film that makes oversized claims of historical import about the individuals, but rather illuminates the importance of the individual in society’s evolution.

Scary Spice: SALT

If nothing else, Salt proves that movie star driven filmmaking can still work when given a tight script, solid craftsmanship and an exciting premise. Luckily, it’s also an elegant, exhilarating spy movie, a throwback to simpler times when the Russians were our clear-cut Cold War enemies and a wholehearted embrace of cutting-edge techno-gadgets and shiny modern surfaces. But it’s mostly about the movie star who fills nearly every scene with megawatt presence.

Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a C.I.A. agent who is accused of being a Russian spy. She claims innocence, but then takes off running. She’s not an easy protagonist, distant and uncommunicative once the action gets going. We don’t see her in many soft moments, nor does she explain herself on the rare occasions that she stops to catch her breath. She always seems to be one step ahead of us, and it’s fun to try and catch up. Jolie is much different here than her last solo action effort, the two Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movies from nearly 10 years ago in which she was called upon to do little more than fill a tight T-shirt while posing her way through elaborate special effects. Here Jolie delivers layers of ambiguity and holds her own in striking close ups that play up her high cheek-bones and her ability to look severe one moment and fragile the next. She’s a remarkably nuanced action hero, made all the more remarkable by how the movie is so willing to make her look so cool.

Evelyn Salt is a mix of LeCarre’s career spies and Jason Bourne, with a dash of The Manchurian Candidate for added flavor, but none of the above were clever, fashionable, capable women. She’s a striking image to see dashing across the screen. She’s running full speed through dangerous stunts, delivering punches and kicks while bouncing off the walls or darting through traffic. She’s clever and resourceful, pulling off surprising escapes. Salt is undeniably awesome. The movie may not always let the audience in on her plans, but I still really wanted her to succeed. Salt is pursued by C.I.A. agents played by Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who happen to be two consistently undervalued performers. They bring weight and shades of gray to what could easily have become nothing more than a pair of forgettable foils. The way they balance out the conflicts in the movie (they have to catch her, but could they trust her claim to innocence?) reminded me of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. They’re not quite up to that level – the script doesn’t allow them that opportunity – but they’re close.

The film careens through tense action beats and all kinds of twisty spy skullduggery. (Even Lee Harvey Oswald is name-dropped). All the while, it makes good use of Jolie’s simultaneous vulnerability and distance, her essential apparent unknowableness. She’s both our anchor and our source of doubt. We care about her survival even though we don’t even know if we can believe her. Director Phillip Noyce has made films across different genres over the course of his career while never enforcing a strong auteur vision on the projects. He has a fine eye for action and a good sense of narrative clarity. Here, he’s working from an enjoyable and efficient script from Kurt Wimmer. It’s a film with hardly any wasted space; the whole thing’s over in barely 100 minutes. This is solid, engaging action filmmaking.

It’s not often that a movie of any kind leaves me anxious for a follow-up, especially a non-franchise property like Salt (though I’d bet Sony is hoping for a Bourne-style franchise in-the-making), but I would have watched the sequel right then and there when the end credits stopped rolling. This movie has such a strong sense of momentum that it flies right into the credits while still speeding forward. Leaving the multiplex, I practically jogged to my car.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

I’ve been suffering from a malaise of disappointment ever since walking out of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so much so that I felt hesitant to write about it. The series has reached such heights (including X2, one of the best superhero movies ever made) that seeing it fall into so much dismaying mediocrity is disheartening. Some fans have complained about the dip in quality between the second and third installments. Wait until they see this.

There’s nothing wrong with the basic story. Wolverine is a cool character, played well by Hugh Jackman, and the movie’s loaded  with cool mutants. But the movie rushes forward like an abridged version of a story with more complexity than we are presented. Relationships between characters are confused, vague, and undefined. This is a rushed, simplistic, movie that trots out characters for a scene or two then hustles them to the sidelines or to their death. The ensemble has been the highlight of past X-Men films. Why keep these characters underused, especially if the extra screen-time isn’t going to be used toward doing more than barely sketching in Wolverine’s background?

The movie starts in 1845 with a soap-operatic scene of confused familial lineage that ends up having no bearing on the rest of the plot, other than to showcase a young Wolverine discovering his bony claws. Then we’re thrust into a montage of wars in which Wolverine and his brother (the future Sabretooth, played by a game Liev Schreiber) fight. It’s never exactly clear why they’re fighting but I just accepted it, not knowing that it signaled a lack of attention to detail that would plague the film throughout. After they get in trouble in Vietnam, the two mutant brothers are approached by General William Stryker (Danny Huston, taking over from X2’s Brian Cox) to join a Dirty-Dozen-style team of mutants for covert missions. The first scene involving the group (which includes mutants with vaguely-defined powers and personalities played by recognizable faces like Ryan Reynolds, will.i.am, and Dominic Monaghan) works fairly well. It moves with a zip and clarity that the movie can never replicate afterwards.

Wolverine quickly leaves the group and moves on until we catch up with him in love with a school teacher and working as a lumberjack. He’s pulled back into a revenge story after the school teacher is killed, a revenge story that’s only a little convoluted and involves injecting adamantium into his skeleton in a procedure presented with none of the visceral horror of the very brief flashbacks in the previous films. The dialogue is often obvious and clunky; the cinematography is equally uninspired. The movie races through its plot, strewing loose-ends and haphazard tie-ins trying to look and plan simultaneously backwards and forwards along its franchise trajectory.

Almost ten years ago, Bryan Singer directed X-Men. At the time, the chief criticism of the film was that it spent too much time explicating the powers and relationships of the various mutants before plunging into the plot. This movie, directed by Gavin Hood, of the slightly overrated Tsotsi and perfectly-rated Rendition, proves that the first film’s approach was correct. The first film, the first two films actually, slowly revealed mutant after mutant, plot-thread after plot-thread, carefully expanding the world of the franchise and grounding them in a slick, stylized reality with real-world (or a gleaming, Hollywood version thereof) sociopolitical ramifications to these mutants. Here, the movie has no consistent tone and dashes through melodrama and not-so-special effects with little style and less wit. These are colorful mutants in cool situations. Why isn’t it more fun?

It’s not an exactly awful film, but it's seriously underwhelming. I expect more from this franchise; at its best, the X-Men films are powerhouses of blended art and commerce (like the great string of superhero films last year which gave us Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight, and Hellboy II). With the bar set so high, Wolverine had much farther to fall, making it even harder to watch as it failed to entertain me. What a way to start the summer movie season.