X-Men Orgins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the inflamed appendix of the Marvel film universe.  The back story of Wolverine before this movie was a perfect collection of vague-but-tantalizing details. We know he's Canadian, over one hundred years old, at some point shadowy military types grafted adamantium onto his skeleton, and he's a bad-ass.  That's really all you need to know. By trying to milk more box office juice out of the X-Men's most marketable character, Marvel has created a brain-dead slog of a lumpy, shambling narrative, baffling character motivation, and a few passable action scenes.  Not to mention one of the most criminally incompetent usages of CGI this side of a Sci-Fi Channel original movie.  

The plot is just garbage.  The effort put towards even trying to make sense of it enough to offer a coherent recap seems like it could be much better used organizing a sock drawer or chewing on some tin foil.  Sufficed to say, the audience is introduced to Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), his homicidal mutant half-brother Victor Creed (Liam Schrieber), a secret government mutant task force headed by the nefarious Major Stryker (Danny Huston), and a first act lifted wholesale from Commando.  It's a collection of nonsense and half-sense driven at all times by characters acting without any apparent motivation when they're not leaping to save another character's life just in the nick of time.  And fan favorite Gambit shows up just long enough to chuck a couple of explosive playing cards and generally go to waste.

Beyond the general ineptitude and laziness that dominates the approach to plot and character, the real indictment of Wolverine is the fact that it doesn't enrich the audience's understanding of Wolverine or the X-Men universe at all.  There's nothing in here that couldn't have been more vividly filled in by your own imagination.  With it's ball of tangled, distracting, loose plot threads, Wolverine brings to mind The Phantom Menace more than anything.  We can be thankful that there is no equivalent to Jar Jar Binks, but a fully CGI Patrick Stewart is a little too close for comfort.