X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE - works, but not as intended

Gavin Hood's addition to the fantastically popular and lucrative X-MEN franchise has attracted mixed reviews. Fans of the original Marvel comics have complained about the cavalier attitude of screen-writer, David Benioff (25th HOUR), to the source material, in particular, the transformation of mutant Logan (Hugh Jackman) into adamantium-enhanced Wolverine in the lab run by General William Stryker (Danny Huston). Logan's relationship with his some-time partner Victor Creed/Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) has also been changed. Other complaints include the fact that we never see Wolverine go berserker and that too many classic comic book characters are introduced and then given not much to do. Perhaps the most damning criticism is that the content of this movie adds precious little to the narrative arc of the original three X-MEN movies. It is, when all is said and done, a $150million irrelevance.

I can't really defend the film against these charges. Nonetheless, I did enjoy watching it. I liked the action set pieces. I liked the sarcastic humour of Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson, even if he was only on screen for 10 minutes. I liked the gallery of mutants. I was genuinely surprised by the plot twists and double-crosses. And most of all, I bought into the love affair between Logan and Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). Hugh Jackman may look ludicrously buff as Logan, but he can also look vulnerable. He sells the love story.

The upshot is that I didn't so much enjoy WOLVERINE as a standard summer blockbuster but as a thriller with some emotional heft, enlivened by the occasional technically brilliant action set-piece. And I think that if you take the movie on those terms, it works perfectly well.

WOLVERINE is on release pretty much everywhere except Japan, where it opens on August 22nd.

THE KITE RUNNER - well-made Afghan drama

THE KITE RUNNER is a handsome adaptation of the best-selling novel by Khaled Hosseini. David Benioff's script cuts down the novel into three main episodes that encapsulate the story of two young boys whose friendship plays out against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, and much later, the Taliban take-over. The first part sees two best friends playing with kites in Kabul. Amir is a cowardly, sensitive, privileged child. He is protected by his best friend Hassan, an illiterate, servant-boy from a tribe that is looked down upon. The two young actors playing these boys - Zekiria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada - have real chemistry and you really believe in their friendship. This makes Amir's betrayal of Hassan all the more tragic. The betrayal is never resolved because Amir is smuggled out of Afghanistan with his father when the Russian's invade. We pick up the story when Amir is courting his wife-to-be in California. Khalid Abdalla and Atossa Leoni are convicingly gauche as the young couple but the real joy of this second segment is the acerbic wit of Amir's father (Homayoun Ershadi). It's also fascinating to get an insider's view of the Afghan community in the US. The third part of the film is the most dramatic and moving. Amir returns to Afghanistan under the Taliban to rescue his childhood friend's young son. Marc Forster and his production team recreate Talibani Afghanistan in the mountains of China and they are unsparing. We see an adulterous women stoned to death at a football match. It's quite amazing. You read of stoning in the Bible - as with all those stories it loses its punch with the re-telling - but you realise how radical and relevant the message of that story is when you realise that people are still subject to such ruthless punishment in contemporary society.

Fans of the novel may feel cheated by the necessary abridgement of its themes and content, but Forster and Benioff have produced a swift-paced, engrossing, well-acted and handsomely-produced film. It moves you, but perhaps more importantly, it gives you a glimpse of life in a country that is of key importance in modern politics.

THE KITE RUNNER is on release in the US, Australia and UK. It opens in the Netherlands, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Norway, Argentina and Singapore in January. It opens in Denmark, Italy, Belgiu, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Iceland, Romania, Turkey and Finland in February. It opens n Spain, Taiwan and Thailand in March and in Japan on May 31st.

STAY - visually stylish but frustrating psychological thriller

STAY is a psycholgical thriller. It is set in modern-day New York and stars Ewan MacGregor as a psychiatrist, Dr Sam Foster. When Foster's colleague suffers a nervous breakdown he takes over one of her patients - a twenty-year old art student called Henry Letham. Letham is threatening to commit suicide on his twenty-first birthday and Foster is desperate to stop him. The problem is that the more Foster investigates Letham's life the more he feels he is losing grip on reality.

The movie is visually stylish and uses jarring edits and dissolves in a clever manner to unsettle the viewer and convey Foster's increasingly tenuous grip on reality. The movie also features a talented cast, including Naomi Watts, Ryan Gosling and Bob Hoskins. It is directed by the man who helmed FINDING NEVERLAND and written by the man behind 25th HOUR. But despite the incredibly impressive look and pedigree of the film, I found STAY to be a noble failure.

I love movies that rely on a clever twist or have an unsettling tone, but in this case so few pointers are given to the audience that the viewing experience becomes frustrating, alienating and finally, plain dull. When the final twist is revealed everything does make sense, but short of going back to re-view the movie it is hard to see what the cinema-goer will gain from the overall experience.

STAY was released in the US in October 2005 and is currently on release in Germany, Italy and the UK. It opens in Austria on April 28th 2006 and in France on July 26th.