X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

"We’re gonna make you invulnerable. But first we’re gonna destroy you.”

Well, this film is ok, I suppose- it certainly looks good, and the montage at the start of “Jimmy” and Victor fighting in various wars is brilliant, but somehow it doesn’t quite catch fire and was ever so mildly disappointing.

Interesting start, though; we learn far more about Logan’s past than I’m sure the comics ever told us. He was a child in 1845, living in what we can loosely call Canadian frontier territory, and his name is James Logan- and the psychopathic Victor Creed (Sabretooth) is indeed his older brother- and they look out for each other, in war after war, for 130 years, until Vietnam, and Colonel William Stryker.

Stryker is, of course, a younger iteration of the baddie from X-Men 2, portrayed superbly by Danny Huston, and hires the brothers as part of a slightly rubbish gang of mutant agents, including a criminally wasted Deadpool, portrayed by Ryan Reynolds but certainly not in continuity with his later solo outing, a far better film than this one. Oh, and one of these mutants, for some reason, is portrayed by a surprisingly decent Will.i.am.

But Logan leaves, in final disgust at Victor’s bloodlust, and six years pass in which he settles down as a lumberjack in the native Rockies with the lovely Kayla Silverfox- until Victor arrives, and kills the woman he loves. The person who was taking him has gone, and he wants revenge against the brother with whom he spent thirteen decades.

And so we come to the pivotal scene, where he survives the agonies of having adamantium bonded to his skeleton. Only with his healing factor can this not kill him, and he seems to barely survive. This is an important scene, and it’s done well.

Except... from this point the film drags, and lots of random elements are included. Nice as it is to see Gambit and the Blob (in a particularly toe-curling scene), they are irrelevant distractions from the newly christened Wolverine and his revenge against Victor Creed, Stryker and their bizarre and vaguely purposed little Island of Dr Moreau full of kidnapped mutants- including, for no good reason, a young Scott Summers.

The last half hour is a mess, with even the revelation of Kayla’s duplicity lacking real emotional heft, although there is real pathos in someone so old and full of tears having his memory cruelly erased. And yet... the film is well shot, and would have worked well if better edited. Was there a clash between the director and the studio?

I’d like to see a director’s cut, but the film we have is unfortunately a bit of a mess, in spite of its good points.

Cosmopolis (2012)

"Talent is more erotic when it's wasted."

I haven't read the original Don DeLillo novel, or indeed anything by him: bad English graduate! But as a script it's superb, fizzling with ideas of Great American Novel standard. And on top of this we get the inspired, stylised directing style of the truly great David Cronenberg. Not all his fans will agree- this is significantly artier date than his better-known work- but it's among his best.

The ideas are superb. Eric Packer is a twenty-eight year old finance billionaire, and he's profoundly alienated from his world. But this alienation isn't existential angst, not even when he murders his own security guard on a whim in a presumed reference to The Outsider. No, this is something much more modern, alienation caused by the deeply abstract, chaotic randomness of our financial system. None of us understand it, but all of us gamble on it in some way and it has the power to wreck our society with crashes and economic storms. And none of it is real, not any more. Not even money is real: most money in the world is just IOU's written by banks, and if it was all called in then the system would collapse. It's absurd, but not in an old-fashioned existentialist sense. It's post-modern capitalism, heady and dangerous, and Eric employs a "head of theory" to pontificate about it. This is a world where financial markets can be thrust into uncertainty by the interpretation of a pause in the speech of the Chinese finance minister.

Eric, over the course of a day, seems to engineer his own self-destruction- casually ending his marriage by blatant infidelity, gambling his fortune on a Quixotic gesture against the yuan and, finally, seeking death. Only there can be find reality.

The visuals of the film complement the themes superbly: most of it is set in cars, and Cronenberg lingers over their erotic visual power in ways that remind me of Crash. The effect is claustrophobic: Eric is limited in where he can go by the chaos (that theme again) of the New York traffic as the president visits, and we see this with the narrow spaces in which he spends the film.

I'm not a fan of Robert Pattinson but he's superb here. And Paul Giamatti is outstanding. But isn't he always?

This is a brilliant film, one packed with far more meaning than I've been able to tease out, and a thing of true beauty. It is also, incidentally, notable for its positive portrayal of Muslims. A superb film.