I heard many men lying

Someday I would really like to see Liev Schreiber in a film that's fully as good as he is. By which you may understand that last night I saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine with my brother, and it . . . was not that film.*

It's not a mind-killer. Fantastic Four (2005) caused me, fleurdelis28, and shmeislin to scream and change the channel (back to Constantine!) after exactly one line and I am convinced that National Treasure (2004) is responsible for certain losses in my long-term memory: Wolverine is not in their league. Some of its sequences are even brilliant, which makes them all the more frustrating in context—I love how after the introductory jolt of parentage and revelation, the credits play over and among the battles that become the calendar of the brothers' lives, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, soldiers of never-changing fortune, healing as we watch from shrapnel, bullets, fire and knives, in free-fall from death to death; the endless carnage is beginning to sicken Jimmy, but Victor grins with a cat's fangs and drags the next soldier down by the throat, breaks the spine of another with his hands; the story that follows is basically a spot-the-powers shell game, but I wanted more of those hundred-plus years that are summarized so beautifully even before the title card comes up. The assembly and introduction of Team X is promising; I don't know which scriptwriter invented the myth of the moon's lover who was tricked out of the spirit world, but it feels like something real, as does the ambiguity of its telling. But mostly Wolverine made me want to read the source comics, because so many of its components (Wade Wilson! Gambit! Recommend me some titles here, people!) would clearly have been awesome if properly handled and do I need to finish this sentence? The script as it stands feels at once overstuffed and underfleshed; there is enough material in this origin story for a trilogy and none of it gets the attention it deserves. And it is a bad sign when I, who do not consider myself a movie-minded person, start thinking about how differently I would have written a scene even as I'm watching it play out. What can I say? It was a perfectly decent place to park your brain for a couple of hours. But that isn't what I go to the movies for.

Still, there are some things to which I have a visceral reaction, and one of them is those claw-tips of Victor's sliding in and out as Schreiber flexes his fingers. (Shanir, god-spawn, unclean, unclean . . .) As far back as I can remember, I have wanted retractile claws. Barring a terrific advance in biomedical engineering, I will be out of luck until the day I die. At least onscreen, vicariously, I can enjoy someone else's better genetic fortune.

* Fortunately, since my brother is here until Sunday, we are going tonight to see Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo at the Underground Railway Theater. That should help balance any brain damage we may have incurred.