*snik* Arrrrggghhh! *snik*

"Splish, Splash, Wolverine was takin' a bath..."

I'm not putting it in the same category as "Spiderman 3" but "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" is a bit of a bust.

The X-Men flicks never quite did it for me. The suspension-of-disbelief threshold rises exponentially with an entire team of super dudes. Strangely enough, the two Fantastic Four outings almost pull it off with sheer goofiness and unintentional camp. The X-Men franchise is a lot less tongue-in-cheek and suffers for it.

This doesn't bode well for the forthcoming Avengers movie (not to mention the likely J.L.A flick.)

Hugh (not gay) Jackman does a decent job looking menacing and macho. It was cute the first time he assumes the hunched-over bodybuilder pose and runs towards his foe (while screaming to the sky: ARRGGGGHHH!) - scraping his adamantium pocket-knives along the ground - but it got a bit old fast.

Say, around the twentieth time.

Also, his hair always looks a little too neat. I smell another bad movie wig.

I've read quite a bit of X-Men in my day and while I sometimes get bored watching overly familiar backstories unspool (bit by a spider? Check!) - this franchise assumes a bit too much familiarity on the part of the audience. And I'm not really certain that it's coming from the film or comic continuity. I didn't really know who was who half the time. Spidey and Batman can probably dispense with detailed origin tales on-screen. They are pretty damn iconic but the X-Men universe is rather convuluted and not exactly a "no-brainer." It's been rebooted and retro-conned so much that this movie could have actually used a bit more of an intro. But billing this as being the titular origin story is a bit of a stretch. Most of what makes Wolverine so -umm- Wolverine-ish is barely even touched on, much less explained.

Not much of a story here in any case, especially without the preceding installments. This is not a work that would stand well on its own. And nothing particularly heroic as far as I can see. Yeah, they killed his girl, he swears revenge etc. But the turnaround in the climax sort of negates all that and makes it a bit silly. And, in the beginning - when Wolfie is involved in some clandestine dark-ops team - they never really explain what the point of the whole enterprise is. Hell if I know what it is. Some sort of sketchy, Dick Cheney Blackwater off-shoot I guess. For the most part it's never really clear if they are good guys or bad guys. (Well, until the raping that is.)

There are precious few eye-candy moments to save the day - at least none not already familiar from the trailer. "Transformers" had a pretty fucking stupid story but damn if it didn't have a pretty high quotient of slam-bang cool stuff.

It's not boring, but it's not exactly interesting either.