X-Men Origins: Wolverine

When it comes to sibling rivalries few can top the one displayed in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the attempt to spin another series of movies out of the hugely successful Marvel superhero franchise. In the film, which heralds the opening of the summer movie season, the brothers are James and Victor -- a pair of mutant Canadians who, when their testosterone elevates, grow long fingernails and snarl viciously at anyone who gets in their way and, for a good deal of the movie, at each other. They are also virtually indestructible and appear to have stop aging at 35, despite being more than 150 years old. (Why this happens is one of the numerous plot points left unexplained, though we do get to see how Wolverine's fingernails become Titanium-like.)

The brothers have spent the last century-and-a-half moving from war-to-war, beginning in the Civil War and lasting right through the recent past where they've been recruited by the U.S. military be be part of an elite mutant corps that perform the kind of things usually reserved for employees of Halliburton. There is no water-boarding seen in the movie, but that's certainly not out of the realm of possibility. Perhaps it just ended on the cutting room floor.

Early on a funny thing happens as Victor and James soldier-of-fortune their way through their long lives: James develops compassion, while Victor becomes more and more out of control. After a particularly nasty incident in an African village, James leaves and settles in the Canadian Rockies as a lumberjack, living in unmarried bliss with a sexy schoolteacher Kayla (Lynn Collins). All this changes when the fellow members of the disbanded mutant brigade begin to turn up dead. Who's the perp? And does James, now named Wolverine after a character in an old Indian tale Kayla relates, escape the assassin?

Certainly any of the original X-Men could have been the focus of this prequel, but the brooding Wolverine effectively captured the imagination of the fans; and that he was played by Hugh Jackman no doubt entered into the equation. Jackman looks like he never met a Nautilus machine he didn't love and is certainly macho enough to make you forget that he ever played Peter Allen on stage. He has little to do here except exhibit extreme mood swings while looking especially fetching in his mutton chops. Perhaps because he's hellbent on a murdering spree, Liev Schreiber is asked to simply look mean and make a wicked little smile when he's performing such acts as strangling an innocent African at the request of his cooly malevolent superior -- Danny Huston, the Army officer with a particularly nasty and manipulative manner.

That nothing makes much sense from moment to moment won't keep fans from enjoying this dark, lean addition to the franchise. Director Gavin Hood keeps the action moving with requisite speed, and holds your interest despite the lapses in credibility in David Benioff and Skip Woods' screenplay (which appears to have lifted its someone is killing the mutants premise from the recent "Watchmen" film.)

There are enough explosions and chases to satisfy the 15-year olds in all of us; and a brief nude scene of Jackman jumping into a waterfall for those of us who welcome such footage. To his credit Hood never dwells too heavily on the violence; and parses out the complicated narrative with some clarity. Perhaps because expectations were so low -- the critics viewing came at the last minute and there were no promo screening -- that "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" didn't seem so bad.

Whether or not the downloaded copy seen around the world this past month will hurt box office remains to be seen. Yet it is hard to imagine fans who may have watched that version -- with its incomplete special effects -- will consider it the last word. If anything, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" deserves to be seen in a theater where its sensory overload can be best appreciated. It may lack the weight and imagination that Bryan Singer brought to the first two "X-Men" films, but there's enough here to keep the die-hard fans happy, as well as the casual moviegoer looking for some escapist fantasy fare, or simply to admire Jackman's butcher side. (No, there are no fantasy musical numbers with him singing and dancing -- perhaps that will be the inevitable sequel.)