Fleshing out a backstory that had only been glimpsed in cryptic flashbacks in X-Men and X2: X-Men United, X-Men Origins: Wolverine explores the days before Logan (Hugh Jackman) joined the X-Men. Chronicling his mid-19th century youth and sibling rivalry with half-brother Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber), Wolverine charts Logan and Victor's years as mercenaries fighting in every American war from the Civil War to Vietnam, where they are given a way out of jail by Col. William Stryker (Danny Huston). And that's just the first 10 minutes.
Stryker recruits Logan and Victor to serve in Team X, his top-secret black ops unit consisting of mutants Wade "Deadpool" Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), teleporter John Wraith (Will.i.am), Bradley Bolt (Dominic Monaghan), and Fred J. Dukes, who will later become The Blob (Kevin Durand). When Team X's activities become too gruesome and morally dubious for him, Logan -- always called "Jimmy" by Victor -- quits the team, a move that pisses his brother off to no end. Flash forward a few years and Logan is living in rustic tranquility with girlfriend Kayla Silverfox (Silver Fox in the comics) in Canada, where he makes an honest wage as a logger.
When former Team X members start getting killed off, Stryker tracks down Logan to warn him. But things are more than they seem -- aren't they always? -- and Wolverine is brought back into the fold to hunt down his brother after Victor attacks Kayla. Agreeing to let Stryker use him as a guinea pig in order to gain an advantage over Victor, Logan is given his adamantium skeleton and claws. With help from Wraith and a New Orleans cardshark/mutant nicknamed Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), Wolverine takes the fight to his enemies as he uncovers what Stryker is really up to.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine turns out not to be the train wreck many had expected. No, it's merely passable entertainment, undone by the same factors that bedevil so many other big genre releases: bad action direction, sloppy storytelling, and breathless pacing that sacrifices character development in favor of rushing into the next big set-piece. It's still better in many ways than X-Men: The Last Stand, but that's not saying much, is it? The story, particularly near the end, attempts to be more clever with its plot twists than it needs to be or can handle (although, in fairness to writers David Benioff and Skip Woods, they're simply taking their cues from the comics); sometimes a straightforward revenge Western is good enough.