B.W. At The Movies: X-Men Origins - Wolverine

It has a few nice moments. Otherwise pretty standard fare. This is one I could have waited for the DVD. Sorry fellow X-fans.

I confess I've never been psyched over Wolverine. I was one of the minority who got into the original run of the X-Men, which was the first second of the Stan Lee era Marvel hero books to be canceled. (The first was The Incredible Hulk.) The team was Marvel's Star Trek, very cool stuff that eventually found its greatest success in a reimagined "next generation" form featuring Wolverine and friends. X-Men was the first comic book collection that I completed: Issues 1-66. But I digress.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine has a decent enough story. I felt like I should care more all the way through. But I didn't. It was more like the moment I found X-Men 25 and the collection was complete: Well, that's over. I'm glad I went, but what was the point?

The film has some nice moments, not the least of which was the surprise appearance of — well, a familiar X-person toward the end. But that moment served to remind me of the first three X-Men movies, which were darn good and launched a new comic-book movie era. And this movie is nowhere near as compelling as those films. Seeing this character for a few fleeting seconds was a reminder of what this puppy could have been.

You want to see the best comic-book movies over and over. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not one of those. If they're going to do X-prequels, they would have been better served to compact this story into the first 15-20 minutes and followed that cameo character's helicopter for the next 90.