x men origins: wolverine

This weeks movie action was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which I believe has been almost universally panned by critics.

And if I'm honest, I can see why. One of the problems with adapting comics has got to be that comic book storylines can be rather convoluted at times. They can also be more than a little nerdy.

So there's always going to be a conflict - do you stick closely to the source material and please the fans? Or do you tweak, adapt and add so that non-comic nerds can get it too?

Of course the answer is to tread a fine line between the two - keep enough so that the fans are happy, but tweak enough so that non-fans get it too. The real key of course is telling a compelling story. Which is where this really falls down. The story just isn't that compelling.

Another problem they've got here is that this is a prequel to a successful trilogy of movies, so they have to end at a point where the existing films pick right up. But they have the added disadvantage that Wolverine's past actual forms one of the core parts of the existing trilogy's store. In other words, we know the jist of the film already.

It also doesn't help that what is one of the more interesting bits of Wolverine's origin - him being Weapon X - is actually skipped over pretty quickly in the film. He gets Weapon X-ified, but the whole bit of him being Weapon X is chopped out.

Also, for me personally the whole Wolvie/Sabretooth thing is actually not all that interesting, and that forms the main part of this story. So it's a bit like a horse with three legs before its really even got a chance to entertain us.

What then makes it a not very good film is that where it does have a chance to be purely entertaining, it kinda fails. I mean, given the scale of some of the stuff in the X-Men films, the action sequences here are distinctly lacklustre. I mean, it feels like they were working with a rather limited budget, shall we say? It also doesn't help that the thing about Wolvie is that he's a proper killer, and yet the stuff here is rather bloodless, presumably so they could get a good rating.

So it was kind of a let down, really.

For me personally as a comic-nerd there were also a few additional problems. I don't generally mind them buggering about with the comic characters too much, but I have to say what they did with Deadpool went a bit far - they somehow gave him loads of other people's powers, including, adamantium swords that grow out of his hands, a bit like Wolvie's claws.

Which brings up all sorts of issues - how the heck these long swords fit in his arms, for one thing, but also, does that mean he also has an adamantium skeleton? Wolvie had bone claws onto which the adamantium grafted, so how did they give Deadpool the swords?

And Deadpool also had all sorts of other powers too, but there doesn't seem to be a point in the film where they're removed, so does that mean Deadpool is some sort of super mutant? Which is to ignore the fact of how they managed to give him the powers in the first place - it seemed remarkably simple and begs the question why they aren't doing it to loads of mutant and to non-mutants.

Which is kinda the other thing - there seemed to be loads of plot holes, and not just with Deadpool. For example, there's a scene where Wolvie believes someone to be dead and it's later explained they're not. But this is Wolvie - he has super hearing and smell and stuff - there's no real reason he wouldn't detect the person was still alive.