Cranky mutant: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a prequel to the other X-Men films, telling the story of how Wolverine got his sharp silver claws, and his nickname, and all that. He’s a mutant, as are all the X-Men, each with a different but remarkable ability, and in the best X-Men stories you have big battles where the mutants team up and outsmart bad guys using their extraordinary talents. Cool stuff. Unfortunately, Wolverine has precious little of it. In the opening scenes we meet a cast of interesting mutant characters, played by interesting actors, like Dominic Monaghan and Will i Am; they are recruited along with Wolverine and his brother Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) for a mysterious government mission in Nigeria, but then Wolverine wearies of the random bloodshed and walks away. After that the story shifts to an idyllic cabin in the Canadian Rockies where our hero is living happily ever after with a pretty teacher, and mostly the rest of the X-Men fade away, showing up only in brief scattered scenes through the rest of the movie. But there’s plenty of slam bam action, because when Wolverine goes AWOL he irks the evil Sabretooth, who is really put out that little bro walked away from the family business. So he sets about trying to destroy Wolverine’s “normal life,” and then Wolverine gets all mad (his signature beserker rage) and agrees to an experimental process to have his skeleton coated with adamantium, because he wants to become indestructible and destroy Sabretooth. Sibling stuff, on a mutant scale.

To the film’s credit, there are plot twists that will surprise anyone who isn’t a diehard fan, and many of the action scenes are well staged and fun to watch. Hugh Jackman is terrific, and Lynn Collins, who plays Kayla (Silverfox to devotees), holds her own against him and brings a nice calm to the over amped proceedings. The portrayal of the foul, motor mouth, quick as lightning Deadpool has caused great angst among X-Men fans, but Ryan Reynolds is really entertaining in the role, and it’s a shame that we don’t get to see more of him. Equally fun is Gambit, a young dude who can turn any object into a deadly weapon; he’s played by Taylor Kitsch, the bad boy from Friday Night lights. X-Men: Origins is a decent popcorn picture, I’d give it a five on a scale of one to ten; it’s no Ironman, but if you’re in the mood for this kind of movie it’s not a bad way to go. Scored the top spot at the box office on its opening weekend, but it will slip against Star Trek come Friday. (Incidentally, if you’re a fan of the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, this one is supposed to be extra good.)