Hugh Jackman is a talented man. He can sing, dance, and act, all the time keeping his handsome good looks to the fore. I thought he was splendid as Curly in the stage version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, and the evidence is there for all to see and hear on an Image Entertainment DVD. That Gavin Hood is a talented director has been proved with Tsotsi and Rendition. How, then, could these two talented men have teamed up to create this incredible mess of a movie? One can only presume that they desire fame and money of larger sorts than they’ve achieved by their excellent work on less flashy productions.

But if it’s flashy you want, then X-Men Origins: Wolverine is for you, with big action set-pieces that pull out all the computer-graphics stops. In one of these, Wolverine (Jackman) is blown aloft by an exploding truck, grabs on to a helicopter, slices its rotors with the blades that spring from his knuckles, and rides the dying copter to the ground, where he walks away as everything explodes behind him. Though the CG is impressive, it’s still noticeable as CG -- in fact, at times, it seems that little effort was made to make it look like the real thing. Perhaps this was aided by the razor-sharp DLP digital image at the theater in which I viewed the film.

In between the action sequences are labored attempts to tell a story, but nothing that will satisfy anyone looking for subtleties or coherence. It seems that Wolverine, aka Logan, was born before the Civil War, and that he has a brother, Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber), and the two were as close as could be. For reasons never explained, they fight together in the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and Vietnam, by which point Logan has had enough and wants to pursue more peaceful ways. While Victor happily goes on killing, Logan is genetically altered into Wolverine by a dark-ops group trying to create a supermutant. When his girlfriend, Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins), is killed, Wolverine sets out to avenge her.

I suppose there’s a lot more to it than that, but X-Fans will have to fill in the blanks from their vast store of X-Men trivia. That the average filmgoer won’t have much of a clue is what’s wrong with all the X-Men films, whose writers seem to assume that the audience will know what’s happening because they’ve read the comic books on which the films are based. But taking X-Men Origins on its own terms, Wolverine is not a particularly likable character who scowls, rages, and destroys, but seems to have few other feelings. It’s hard to identify with the X-Men characters as portrayed on film.

If you can sit through the entire end credits, you’ll be rewarded -- punished? -- with a scene that almost surely promises a sequel. I’d rather see Hugh Jackman in some more Rodgers and Hammerstein. Carousel, anyone?

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