X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) 

Directed by Gavin Hood 

Written by David Benioff, Skip Woods

Starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Ryan Reynolds, Dominic Monaghan

Release Date May 1st, 2009 

Published May 4th, 2009 

Arguably the most revered of all superheroes, among the hardcore comic book fans, Wolverine has long deserved his own place in the comic book movie world. Nothing against the X-Men movies which were of varying but often superior quality but Hugh Jackman's Wolverine always seemed to strain against the convention of the superhero team. Granted, some of that was by design, the character has always been a lone wolf, so to speak.

But more than the design of the character, Wolverine and Hugh Jackman were simply bigger than the X-Men, as the character really has always been. Thus, there is a great deal of pressure on this Wolvie movie X-Men Origins Wolverine. The pressure to live up to an outsized reputation and the pressure to live up to beyond outsized fan expectatons.

Origins traces the life of young James Logan from the day he found out he was a mutant who could grow claws of bone through years of work as a mercenary alongside his mutant brother Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) in the US Army, to the day he tried to leave mercenary work behind and live a life of peace and normalcy.

For a time Logan worked with a team of mercenaries assembled by General Stryker (Danny Huston). Along with his brother, Logas fought alongside shooting expert Agent Zero (Daniel Henney), Swordsman Wade 'Deadpool' Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), Chris 'Bolt' Bradley (Dominic Monaghan), John Wraith (Will I Am) and Frederick The Blob Dukes. Together this team committed what Wolverine comes to believe are atrocities, hence why he walked away.

Of course, if they had just let Logan retire we wouldn't have much of a movie. Living in Canada, Logan has met a woman, Kyla Silverfox (Lynn Collins) and is living an idyllic life when General Stryker arrives with a warning, someone has begun killing the team. It's Sabretooth and he wants to make his brother pay for walking away.

With Stryker's help, Logan undergoes a procedure intended to give him the ability to not merely fight his brother but do something no conventional weapon could do, kill him. With the use of out of this world technology that bond unbreakable metal with all of Logan's bones, he becomes the indestructible Weapon X, Wolverine.

Directed by Gavin Hood, X-Men Origins: Wolverine has some terrific action and some seriously goofball stuff. The good stuff is watching Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber go claw to claw. The good stuff is Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool taking out room full of armed men with just two swinging swords.

The goofball stuff is the stuff from the trailers and commercials for Wolverine. The flying from an exploding car to a helicopter to walking away in slow motion as the copter explodes. We've seen goofball stuff like this before and have become immune to the point of kitschy laughter at how cheesy they seem and how self satisfied filmmakers seem with these scenes.

The mythology stuff, all of the back story, the Origins of the title, will appeal only to the hardcore fans who will search for their other X-Men favorites among a group of child mutants rescued by Wolverine late in the film. Hardcore fans who can name the real name of Agent Zero without having to look it up. Those fans will no doubt be stoked by the high level of efficacy or terribly disappointed by whatever inaccuracy they can seize upon. Even in the nitpicking they will find pleasure. Those not in the cult however may be a little put off by the thickness of the plotting, especially since so much of the action doesn't deliver enough distraction from the plot.

Still, what works for Wolverine is Hugh Jackman whose cut physique and cigar chomping charisma perfectly capture the elemental badass nature of Wolverine. He was the perfect choice for this role in the X-Men movies and he has only grown more comfortable and capable as the character has progressed. Wolverine gets us past alot of the troubled, overly dense plotting of X-Men Origins.

Mostly for the hardcore fan, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is sub-par by the standard set by The Dark Knight, Spiderman and Iron Man. On it's own, away from the lofty comparison, it succeeds with Hugh Jackman's performance, as a summertime filler that should please the faithful.

Movie Review Official Secrets

Official Secrets (2019)

Directed by Gavin Hood

Written by Gavin Hood 

Starring Keira Knightley, Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Rhys Ifans

Release Date October 18th, 2019

Published October 18th, 2019 

Official Secrets is the kind of sturdy, unassailable drama that director Gavin Hood is good at making. Dispassionate and a little dull, longing for colorful characters to liven up the presentation, but filled with factual interpretation that is true to the subject and dramatized well enough to hold your attention and earn most of the feelings intended by the story being told. Call it the church of being just good enough. 

Official Secrets, a title I struggle to remember even as it is a title that fits well in the context of the story, stars Keira Knightley in the true story of Katherine Gunn,  a worker bee at a British intelligence agency in the midst of the most recent Iraq conflict. The American government is pushing hard for war and Tony Blair has become George W Bush’s go-to ally for getting the pro-war message out. Everyday, the case for war is growing and it will take a revolutionary act of defiance to slow it down. 

That was the act of Katherine Gunn, an act of revolutionary defiance. Gunn stole a memo from her work interpreting and transcribing intelligence drama for the GSA. In the memo was proof that the Americans were spying on members of allied countries in hopes of pressuring those countries to vote in favor of going to war against Saddam Hussein. Releasing this explosive memo to the public would be an embarrassment to British leadership and turn the British public further against the war. 

With the help of a war protesting friend, the memo goes from Katherine, through to a reporter at the Observer newspaper, Martin Bright who, with the help of his editor, Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode) and a fellow reporter working in America, Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans), manages to confirm the information and print it in the newspaper. You assume from here that this is an inspiring story of a whistleblower but Official Secrets doesn’t seek to inspire as much as it strives to tell what really happened. 

The reality was that it took weeks before the memo was published and enough time passed that Katherine began to think it would never be printed and she was okay with that. Rather than being single mindedly obsessed with getting the truth out, Katherine is frightened and resigned to the fate of the world going to war even as she knows it should not be happening. When the memo is published, Katherine becomes exposed and rather than being inspired to the fight, she is dragged into defending herself before finally buying into her own cause. 

That’s pretty much as it happened in reality as well. Katherine Gunn became a revolutionary almost by accident. She wanted to stop the war but she was plagued by doubts and was even willing to forget about the whole thing and go on with her life while the war that she knew was illegal and unjust raged on. Katherine is a hero but a complex one and Keira Knightley does well to play that conflict and allow that to drive the narrative nearly as much as exposing the war as a fraud. 

Of course, this movie doesn’t do us much good now. Movies like Official Secrets feel obsolete in the wake of all that has happened, including the Iraq War, Afghanistan and the conflicts we appear to be readying for around the globe today courtesy of a President seemingly spoiling for a fight. It’s great to have a historic document like Official Secrets but the film doesn’t escape from the futility of the history that inspired it. 

You have a duty to stand against tyranny is a good message but not one that Official Secrets makes all that memorably or forcefully. 

Movie Review Rendition

Rendition (2007)

Directed by Gavin Hood

Written by Kelly Sane 

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgard, Alan Arkin

Release Date October 19th, 2007

Published October 18th, 2007 

Those who advocate intelligence gathering techniques that extend beyond our constitution have a compelling argument. They cite intelligence gathered by extraordinary measures that have saved lives and how men who are truly bad guys have received the treatment they deserve for the things they did. This argument holds sway until you hear from Arizona Senator John McCain, a real life torture victim.

Senator McCain, a right wing, pro-war hawk opposes any action that associates America and torture. McCain's point is that torture simply doesn't work. That a tortured man will tell you anything you want to hear. The movie Rendition makes McCain's point in dramatic fashion as it tells the interlocking story of how torture effects the lives of so many different people in so many different ways.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Rendition as Douglas Freeman a CIA pencil pusher who finds himself thrust into the job of case worker in northern Africa following a terrorist attack. His new job will be to observe the tactics of a man named Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), tactics that are considered torture under American law. It will be Abasi who will attempt to glean information from the latest subject of what American law refers to as Extraordinary Rendition.

On his way home from a business trip in South Africa, Anwar Al Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is detained by police and then the CIA. It seems that he has received calls on numerous occasions from a terrorist named Rashid, calls he claims to be unaware of. Al Ibrahimi was returning home to Chicago where his very pregnant wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) and his six year old, American born son are waiting for him.

When he doesn't return and somehow disappears from the flight log, Isabella travels to Washington where an ex-boyfriend, Alan (Peter Sarsgard) works for a Senator (Alan Arkin). Using his connections, Alan finds out as much as he can about Anwar's disappearance. The trail leads all the way to the head of the CI, Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep).

Those are the main players in Rendition and their relative positions. Where director Gavin Hood moves them from there is quite compelling and heart rending. Running parallel to this main story is the modest love story of Khalid (Moa Khouas) and Fatima (Zineb Oukach), the daughter of Abasi Fawal, the lead torture expert.

The melding of these two stories is where Rendition struggles and becomes sluggish and where director Gavin Hood employs a narrative trick that will irritate many in the audience as much as it did me. There is a moment, and I won't go into detail, late in the film where the timeline shifts and what we get is a scene that lets the air out of what was an electrically charged and tense series of scenes.

From this point on the films dueling stories become fractured and I was left struggling to connect these stories at all beyond the most tenuous of bonds.

A man, if tortured long enough, will tell you anything you want to hear. Whether what he says is true or not, doesn't matter to the torturers whose reward is for information. The truth is someone else's business. Rendition is extraordinarily powerful in bringing home the same message that Senator John McCain has always talked of, how torture simply doesn't work. Indeed, as the film states plainly, if you torture one man you create ten more who will rise up to fight back to protect them, or rescue them.

According to the Bush administration, Americans don't torture. No, we don't. By laws installed during the Clinton Administration, we hire less reputable countries to torture on our behalf. Ah, but Rendition doesn't let us off so easily that a liberal like myself can be satisfied with the answer that our policy of rendition is simply wrong. The lead torture expert in the film is portrayed as a good man who loves his family and believes he is doing the right thing.

Meryl Streep's CIA agent may be cold hearted and portrayed as something of a monster but her point about the lives she believes have been saved by information gathered through extraordinary rendition is powerful and logical. With the blinding certainty of a zealot, not unlike a certain President of the United States, she sees only the possibilities of this practice, not the collateral damage to our national conscience.

The love story between Khalid and Fatima is used to illustrate what some experts would call blowback. Militarized by the torture death of his brother, Khalid is enticed to become a suicide bomber. Fatima becomes his reason to live and there is a good deal of emotion invested in this subplot. It might have been more powerful without director Gavin Hood's narrative cheat late in the film that sucks all of the suspense out of the movie.

Yet another film in this early Oscar season, like The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, like Michael Clayton, Across The Universe or Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Rendition is a film with Oscar pretensions that falls just short of expectations. A grand cast of Oscar nominees and winners, compel us from beginning to end but narrative trickery and a strung together plot; let the air out of what should have been a potboiler of real emotion and suspense.