At The Movies With Peter Travers: “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”
This weekend At the Movies marks the official beginning of summer. Don’t bother checking your calendars, Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers says with X-Men Origins: Wolverine hitting theaters on May 1st, Hollywood’s Summer Movie Season has officially began. And it starts off with a yawn. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was the best part of the original X-Men trilogy, but here the most personable actor on Earth grimaces his way through a action film that gets too repetitive after its stunning, century-spanning opening sequence. Plus, it didn’t help the potential box office when the entire workprint of the film leaked out onto the Internet more than a month before its release date. Thanks to Liev Schreiber’s performance as Wolverine’s mutant brother Victor/Sabretooth, the film avoids the Scum Bucket. Wolverine is okay, Travers says, and simply “starts the summer in a nice popcorn way.”
And then there’s the deplorable Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, starring the newly crowned King of the Rom-Coms, Matthew McConaughey.
This Scum Bucket-bound film is a horror show, but what did you expect from the actor whose given us The Wedding Planner, How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch and Fool’s Gold in the span of a decade? Copping the storyline from A Christmas Carol, the film also stars Jennifer Garner as McConaughey’s love interest and Michael Douglas as Matthew’s dead uncle who returns as a ghost to show our gigolo protagonist how poorly he’s treated women. During a scene when it’s pouring rain outside, Douglas’ character actually says the line “Those are the tears of all the women whose hearts you’ve broken” to McConaughey. Avoid this film at all costs. Unless at all costs” means you’re forced to see Beyoncé’s even-worse Obsessed. If that’s the case, feign swine flu immediately.
Read Travers’ reviews here: