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Hey, everyone.  After a long freshman year at college, I’m back full-time to review summer movies.  Let’s start with X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Many people’s hatred for this fourth film set in the X-Men universe has been made abundantly clear by now.  However, I for one found this summer kick-off which focuses primarily on Wolverine to be an entertaining ride.  Basically, if you’re more of a movie buff than a comic one and couldn’t care less about how characters like Deadpool are portrayed, for example, or if you just enjoy Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of the tough-as-nails antihero with indestructible talons of steel, you should like this movie.

It tells the story of James Howlett, a.k.a Wolverine, who grew up confused and unsure of himself.  You can’t blame him either, since sharp bones grow out of the skin between his knuckles whenever he becomes angry.  One fateful night, James’ father dies and this event sends him off into the world alongside his half-brother Victor (played by Liev Schrieber in his later years).  Over the course of many years and many wars, James and Victor develop a close bond; the pretty nifty opening credits track their movements through the Civil War, WWII, the Vietnam War and so on and so forth.  Curiously, James and Victor stop aging once they look like Hugh Jackman and Liev Schrieber, but we’re not supposed to question things like that in a movie like this.

It’s not until after all these endless wars when James and Victor are approached by mysterious military man William Stryker (Danny Huston), who wants them to join a top-secret program that brings together various mutants.  Their task: to search the globe for a certain meteorite Stryker wants to get his hands on.  But the violence this mission entails eventually unnerves James, who believes innocents should be given a second chance.  As you can expect, he leaves the team.  But six years later, after James, or let’s just call him Logan now, the temperamental Victor, or Sabertooth, is hunting down the former team members for some unknown reason.  And after tragedy befalls Logan after Victor comes for him, he temporarily joins forces with Stryker once more so that he can become Wolverine and put a stop to his rogue half-brother once and for all.

It’s a given that films like Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” have re-shaped the mold for today’s comic book adaptations, and “Wolverine” recognizes this and promptly structures itself to fall perfectly within that outline.  This is perhaps my 2nd favorite of all the films in the “X-Men” franchise because for the first time, it deals with what makes a hero like Wolverine tick.  The script delves into his personal life before he became the amnesiac wandering the snow-covered streets in some distant place he was when we first met him in Bryan Singer’s “X-Men”.  Sure, there are some inconsistencies in the timeline leading up to that film, but not once did I let that detract from my entertainment.  The same thing goes for a brief 2-second shot where there’s a plasma TV screen in the background when the story is set sometime in the 80′s.  What I did care about, and what took center stage thanks to director Gavin Hood, was Wolverine’s inner turmoil and how it shaped him into the person we know from the “X-Men” trilogy.  Oh, and of course the entertaining action as well.

As expected, Hugh Jackman is at his snarling best as the mutant with claws of destruction.  If there’s a type of character Jackman is adept at playing, it’s the badass loner of an action hero who, in his words, comes for blood with “no law or code of conduct”.  Whenever he goes into his destructive mode, it’s relatively easy for us to buy it.  But I think I should also discuss the supporting actors, who are relatively good as well.  Liev Schreiber makes for one teeth-gnashingly despicable bad guy.  His power is extending those yellow nails of his into lethal weapons that would make anyone wanting to give him a manicure instantly shut up.  But if those nails weren’t enough to help sell him to you as the villain, he’s always clad in a black ovetrcoat that screams “nefarious”.  Danny Huston is also pretty decent as Stryker, who’s the real bad guy and is secretly developing a weapon that fans of the “X-Men” universe will no doubt recognize.  The rest of the cast is delegated to much smaller roles, each of which probably totals up to under 30 minutes of screentime.  but the ones worth mentioning are Taylor Kitsch as the card-wielding Gambit and Ryan Reynolds as Deapool.  Reynolds’ role is so small, in fact, that it would seem fair to say that if you blink, you may miss it.

The director, Gavin Hood, is treading unfamiliar waters here.  Until now, he has helmed more character driven pieces such as “Rendition”, but he surprisingly pulls off the big action sequences quite well.  Of course, this may partly be attributed to one of the film’s executive producers, Richard Donner, who it is said lended a helping hand to the visualization of these huge set pieces.  If you like big explosions and some neat hand-to-hand mutant combats, you shouldn’t be disappointed by the action here.  But nevertheless, Hood’s ability to capture human emotion remains intact.  “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” clearly isn’t in the same league as films like “The Dark Knight” or “Spider-Man 2″, but the ruminations it does make about the thin line between heroism and cold-blooded murder  do carry some weight.

At the end of the day, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” does its job.  It entertains, first and foremost, but it also paints an interesting portrait of a tortured antihero who just wants some piece and quiet.  And if that means cutting down a few bad guys and decimating a few buildings in the process, then so be it.

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