X-Men Origins: Wolverine Review

Having accepted my de facto role as the “comic-via-film guy” (a term I now have sole proprietary rights over), I have little choice but to sink my figurative teeth into the gristle-filled, undercooked, bologna-style mystery meat that is and forever will be X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

It’s probably futile at best and shortcut to some serious self-loathing/existential brooding to discuss my knowledge, background and relationship with X-Men (read: “cred”), but, for the love of blog, that is what I do, for a living: produce information and go all editorial on the latest pop cultural pitter-patter. Oh, and try to impress people with my knowledge of illustrated narratives that will never cure cancer, AIDS, Swine Flu or even something substantially less impressive like, I don’t know, reinvent the wheel.

X-Men, like many other comic series that have seen several iterations over the course of several decades and eras with creative teams coming and going, has a cosmology that makes “continuity” impossible—nay, laughably impossibly. Going from WASP-y weirdo’s in the 60s to Billy Jack-style multi-cultural in the 70s to the endless—dare I say—mutation the series underwent during the 80s , 90s and, as I have learned all too late, the oughties, maintaining any coherent mythos for characters while still keeping them up-to-date is, well, hard. In fact, I imagine many a comic scribe has uttered the most deserved hyperbolic negation of all time, namely: “Maintaining continuity is the hardest thing in the world.”

But, up till the departure of Claremont in 1991, one thing remained consistent, relevant and, you know, awesome: Logan, aka Wolverine. That’s right, for just a shade under 2 decades, Wolverine was ironically cool, James-Dean-meets-Method-Acting- bizarro-Robin Williams, mysterious and, unlike the record label, openly Canadian. It wasn’t the leather or flannel jackets, it wasn’t the boots, the J-Pop hair or the sideburns, there was something genuinely (insert Ad Busters link here) “cool” about him. This is probably where that whole “mysterious” attribute factors in.

So, like the oh so many mystery-clearing plotlines and series arcs that followed after Claremont’s departure, most of which were illogical, continuity-questionable or just, well, X-Men Origins: Wolverine tells a story that was always much more interesting left in the dark. The problems, however, don’t end there.

Moving quickly over two centuries and several of the more memorable wars (Spanish-American War was sadly absent), Wolverine tells you, once again, everything you had already learned in the previous three X-Men films but, you know, with less coherent direction and acting. The ever-dependable Danny Huston was reduced to a quivering pile of jingoist military clich