Movie Review: X-men Origins

Non-commercials from now till next Wednesday include the usual Blank Page gallery Tuesday-night offering and the every-other-month Laurel and Hardy fan club movie, Tuesday the Blank Page offers me explaining, with a film clip, why Orson Welles' Citizen Kane ranks so high at 7 followed sharp at 8 by the movie itself. That's me at 7 and Citizen Kane at 8 Tuesday, in the Blank Page gallery at 917 West Douglas. The Laurel and Hardy program is Friday, with the feature Way Out West and the shorts "The Pigskin Palooka" and "Bored (b o r e d) of Education" at 6:30 Friday in the Calvary United Methodist Church, 2525 North Rock Road.

And commercially, we officially enter the adolescent playpen with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which got three stars in USA Today but has earned bleak evaluations elsewhere. It will satisfy many of the undemanding devotees of comic-book-superhero movies because it has a great deal of action and big enormous orange explosions and does not burden our minds with much of a plot; its characters, though portrayed by such major talent as Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, are cartoons and though it gestures in the direction of various current themes like secret wars and government corruption, it doesn't even do much with its title theme of origins, since both Jackman's Wolverine and Schreiber's Sabretooth are simply mutants, not results of the customary atomic or biological experiments; the same experiences that turn Jackman into a good-guy loner turn Schreiber into a motiveless villain of the deepest dye, so social experiences don't explain origins, either. Since origin stories are usually even less credible or interesting than superhero careers, this is no great loss. But there is nothing to fill up the void, as far as thought content is concerned.

What does fill up the void is a whole lot of violence. The fights are performed mostly in the editing room; I'm not sure either Jackman or Schreiber is a capable acrobat, which is what the fight actions call for. Mostly they just scream piercingly and rush at each other like charging buffalo and then skitter across the floor and get up and slash at the open air, knowing that the cutting will make clear that they are on the set at the same time. Action other than one-on-ones include a really impressive orange explosion that the hero walks away from without a glance back, which was so well done in, I think, Syriana, and a whole lot of floor windows and fall great distances and are sometimes even injured thereby; but the device of the obviously dead turning out to be alive is introduced early, so we aren't too shaken up. Pain is of so little interest that the operation Jackman undergoes which subjects him to such pain as few men could undergo does not indicate pain at all, but will remind you that the Frankenstein monster was enlivened by a bolt of lightning, too. Screenwriters David Benioff and Skip Woods and director Gavin Hood would never resort to a source of energy from the early thirties, though; their electricity is created by a machine.

Which is about as creative as X-Men Origins: Wolverine gets. But don't get to sure you don't want to see it: lists of what's coming up this summer indicate that worse is likely to follow. And it does have a lot of slam bang boom crash, with orange fireclouds. What else would you expect? It's summer.