Origin stories in superhero movies are tricky things. Usually, they are just things that need to be gotten out of the way before the real action begins. So devoting an entire film to the backstory of the most beloved of the X-Men was a dicey proposition, and one that smelled eerily like a blatant cash grab. But, if done well, it could delight X-Men fans. Unfortunately, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a clunky mess that, while well-made, never shakes how empty and unnecessary it is. 

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

The film opens in northwest Canada in 1845 (despite the fact that Canada didn’t exist until 1870), when we meet young Jimmy Logan and his older brother, Victor Creed, the future Sabretooth. The two boys are hosts to amazing healing powers and animalistic mutations (clawlike fingernails for Victor, retractable bone claws for Jimmy), the deployment of which necessitates a hasty retreat from their boyhood home.  After Logan and Victor grow up into Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, respectively, their healing powers allow them to age at an incredibly slow rate. Despite being Canadian, they fight in several American wars together, which we see in a montage over the film’s opening credits, including the Civil War, two World Wars and Vietnam (I guess they sat out Korea and the Spanish-American War).

After a century of fighting alongside his brother, Logan finally figures out what it took the rest of us about a minute to notice: Victor is a bit of a kill-crazy nut. After Victor kills a superior officer in Vietnam, the two are shot by a firing squad. When killing them doesn’t work, they are recruited by the sinister Col. Stryker (Danny Huston) into a special unit of mutant operatives. The unit seems to operate outside the law, and soon, Logan, disgusted by the slaughter of innocents in which he’s asked to take part, quits the unit and hightails it back to Canada. Until, of course, Stryker tries to pull him back in.

The film was directed by Gavin Hood, who made the amazing film Tsotsi, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar a few years ago. Placing a giant summer tentpole such as this in the hands of an action newbie like Hood might seem like a bad idea, but, ironically, the action sequences are probably the most successful aspects of the film. The explosions and set pieces are well put-together, including Wolverine leaping from an exploding truck onto a helicopter and a three-way fight on the smokestack of a nuclear reactor. It’s everything else that feels rushed and hollow.

Take the example of Logan’s relationship with Kayla (Lynn Collins). After Logan leaves the army, we next see him six years later, shacked up with Kayla. This relationship is meant to be the linchpin of the film, which drives all of Logan’s actions thereafter, but we couldn’t care less about the lovers. They claim to love each other, but we see no evidence of it, no chemistry. Indeed, they only get a few scenes together. We don’t even find out how they met, or how Kayla reacted when Logan told her he’s a mutant who’s more than a century older than her.

Hood fails to wring any emotional resonance from these sections of the movie, but the failure probably lies more in the screenplay, by David Benioff (who wrote the excellent 25th Hour) and Skip Woods (Swordfish). The script includes some nice dialogue here and there (although for every good line there’s a scene in which Wolverine raises his arms to the sky and screams “Nooooo!!!”), but the movie’s plotting is often lazy and illogical. Because it’s a prequel, the script creaks under the weight of the plot points it has to hit (Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton, his memory loss), often failing to make emotional or logical sense as it strains to do so.

There are lots of hoary old tropes that we’ve seen before, like the kindly old couple that takes in our hero, or the doomed love interest that shapes his life, but the relentless plotholes have to be the most maddening aspect of the lazy, often nonsensical script. There is discussion of transferring mutant powers from one person to another, but not one line even trying to explain how that happens. And when viewed in retrospect, not a bit of Stryker’s plan to fortify Logan’s skeleton with the indestructible metal adamantium — not the steps made to convince him or the immediate efforts to kill him after the experiment succeeds — make a single bit of sense. And don’t get me started on adamantium bullets.

Schreiber, as Victor, is probably the best thing in the film. As someone who normally gravitates toward loftier projects, he fully unleashes his menace and ferocity. Considering how sinister and charismatic Schreiber is in the role, it’s odd how much of a nonentity that Tyler Mane’s version of Sabretooth was in the first X-Men.

Wolverine always worked best as a mysterious, wisecracking badass, and Jackman played him beautifully as such in the previous X-Men movies. Here, the writers try to give Wolverine the full-on, massively tragic background, but the script drops the ball pretty thoroughly, and the brooding, wounded-romantic version of Wolverine we see here, despite Jackman’s best efforts, isn’t all that interesting.

The filmmakers seem to be able to sense this, because we get lots of visits from other mutants in an effort to liven things up. We meet Gambit (Friday Night Lights’ Taylor Kitsch), a Cajun gambler who can charge objects, usually playing cards, with kinetic energy. We also get a little cameo from Scott Summers, the future Cyclops, who can shoot energy beams from his eyes—except here he’s a teenager in 1979, which makes him about 10 years older than James Marsden, who played him in the three X-Men movies. 

In the end, the script also loses a little heft because the movie is a prequel and we know that some of the characters won’t die. The entire movie seems to be building toward Wolverine’s confrontation with both Stryker and Victor, but if you’ve seen the other X-Men films (and if you haven’t, I’m about to spoil some stuff for you), then you know that they both survive, which gives this film a rather frustrating nonending. And Wolverine’s memory loss, if handled correctly, could feel like some sort of grand tragedy, but the way it’s handled here merely makes the entire movie seem pointless and moot.

Nothing much in Wolverine is outright terrible, but most of it just plain doesn’t work. The mediocrity on display is stunning. Viewed as a stand-alone story, the film fails consistently, and as a piece of X-Men lore it is likely only to enrage fans, butchering established continuity and beloved characters. Wolverine gets to forget everything that happened here, but outside of some pretty explosions, there isn’t all that much that anyone would want to remember.

Carey Norris is a frequent contributor to www.bhamweekly.com 

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