Last Friday many of you comic nerds flocked to the theatre to check out what you hoped to be the restoration of the X-Men franchise after it’s weakest chapter X-Men: The Last Stand. After a few years of throwing shit at Brett Ratner, director of X3, it’s nice to have a new target of geek ire for target practice – the director of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Director Gavin Hood got the nod to run this project based on hitting a label with his name on it with a dart from ten paces by a blindfolded Fox producer. This maybe inaccurate, but some other as random process must’ve been employed. In this recession even huge studios have to cut corners but it seems picking an inexperienced director saved the special effects budget. Hood has done nothing like this before; and, although the camera shots weren’t the real problem, he should’ve worked a bit better with the writers. In this film he comes off as a competent cinematographer, but little else. Where the fuck is Bryan singer when you need him?

David Benioff we assume is a fan of the main character, cause the screenplay writer looks like Wolverine, but isn’t up to the task of painting the complex picture that James “Wolverine” Logan’s background requires. I am by far no expert on the comics myself, but then again I wouldn’t write for the film until I was. It seems like he picked an assortment of background characters from the X-Men universe, determined whose powers could be rendered decently then made them part of the story. Wade “Deadpool” Wilson is one of my favorites and was cast well with pretty boy smart-ass Ryan Reynolds, but is lame by the end as the amalgamated Weapon XI. If Logan is Weapon X, the tenth, shouldn’t you pay a bit of lip service to Weapons I through IX? Doesn’t the geek curiosity gnaw at our very soul?

At least we’ve got some hokey dialogue and predictable twists along the way. Wait. That’s not a selling point. The romance story has his fingerprints all over it, but is really thin with too much foreshadow. The genesis of the Wolverine code name is part of it and doesn’t really fit. Do the nasty little furry balls really bay at the moon? Isn’t that what a wolf is known for? Why is he in love with this chick? These are answered in act three with plot hollowing exposition and a twist you saw coming half an hour before. After Logan gets the claws to exact his vengeance, the story feels like it’s going down a checklist of setting the stage for the first X-Men movie.

Skip Woods, the other main writer, has done little but sufficient work in the past with the scripts for Swordfish and Hitman. Decent films, but Benioff wrote for Troy – one of my favorites – so I’m gonna pick on Woods a bit more since the writing has the stink of his hackneyed characterization. The story has plot holes so big they could only be ripped by adamantium claws. This corny analogy is in tone with much of the dialogue of the movie and scene set ups. Many fights are done so for the naked obvious reason that they’re cool to see – not out of much story necessity. Le Beau stops Wolvie from killing Creed, why? Gambit’s name comes from playing cards, not chess? Sabretooth looks nothing like the same character in the first X-Men, and doesn’t remember his own brother? Wolverine can’t grow back memories, why?

If you just want a decently shot action flick with cool powers, X Origins is at least that. As a comic origin story made movie it really falls short compared to Spiderman, Batman Begins and the first Superman. I thought this was era of treating comic heroes with depth? Was there another writer’s strike this year?

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