X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins attempts to wade through the back story of Marvel’s most popular of mutants, Wolverine. We follow him as a young boy in 1885 where he witnesses the murder of a man he has known as his father. As we know from the previous X-men films pubescent mutants can be handful and the young Mr Logan looses control of that pesky rage of his and promptly wields his bony claws to attacks his father’s killer.

In fear and confusion he runs off with half brother Sabertooth promising to protect one another. What follows is a series of montages of the grown up siblings fighting back to back through the Civil War, WW1 + WW2 and Vietnam before their animal instincts lead them to behead a prisoner and kill a squad of armed soldiers. This misdemeanour sees them hauled to execution only to survive a barrage of gunfire thanks to their mutant regeneration powers.

William Stryker, Wolverine’s future nemesis, catches wind of the brother’s ‘talents’ and seeks them out in order to offer them a place on his special ops, mutant task force. After an incident during a raid in Africa, the group’s no holds barred attitude weighs too heavily on Logan’s conscience and he leaves to live out the rest of his life as a lumberjack.

If Origins intended to shine a light on Wolverine’s murky past it fails to do so with any detail or conviction. Instead the intrigue posed by the previous three films, of the movie arm in the Marvel franchise, is re-packaged into an ‘Explosion of the Day’ highlight reel.

Origins does however, answer the question of, how many times it is possible to watch a grown man howl, melodramatically at the sky before feeling slightly amused. The answer is once.

Naturally irked by his desertion, Stryker and Sabertooth inevitably catch up with old ‘mutton chops’ in the Canadian hills and conjure a plan to force him back into the fold.

The murder of his wife, Silver Fox, (cue howl number one) sends him on the revenge mission that ultimately leads to the rather painful insertion of his (cue howl number two) Adamantium skeleton.

Dazed, confused and down right angry, he claws his way through a few walls and runs naked into the picturesque countryside and into the barn of a couple who look suspiciously like Jonathon and Martha Kent. Well aware of the potential fall out of Wolverine’s escape, Stryker and his team disregard all civilian life in pursuit, much to the misfortune of Mr and Mrs Kent. Cue melodramatic howl number three.

Devoid of the humorous one-liners of his previous Wolverine scripts, howling is all Hugh Jackman has to work with while Liev Schreiber, (The Sum of All Fears, Defiance) is suitably menacing as the merciless, sadistic, Sabertooth.

Fans of the comic will be annoyed rather heartened by the brief, nonsensical cameos of Cyclops, Professor Xavier and personal favourite, Gambit.

While the film postures to be a story about the internal struggle between Wolverine’s human and animal sides, the lack of character depth or plot detail makes this a money spinning yet needles addition to the X-Men series.