A 'Spider-Man' that's long on creativity

A Marvel story that's (gasp!) actually animated and better for it.

Who knew? In the complex and baffling expanse of comic-book realities, a Spider-Verse awaits. We're talking about alternate universes or dimensions where many Spider-Men assume their crime-fighting burdens. To make Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse even more intriguing the familiar Spider-Man -- a.k.a. Peter Parker -- almost immediately falls victim to Kingpin, a gargantuan villain whose girth seems to represent a lifetime of accumulated evil.

Oh well, those of us who grew up before the current wave of Marvel comics broke across the culture may not have known all this, but it probably comes as no surprise the legions of fanboys who were nurtured by Stan Lee's cornucopia of comics.

As if to bow to the origin of all things Marvel, this edition of Spider-Man is animated by a gifted team that wisely has given the movie the texture of an actual comic book with visible Ben-Day dots, panels, and occasional captions.

It's a bit early in the review to introduce a footnote, but for the record: Chris Pine gives voice to the original Peter Parker, who, as mentioned, succumbs early. Liev Schreiber voices Kingpin.

Kingpin, by the way, has an associate named Dr. Octopus (Kathryn Hahn). She has something to do with the technology that allows the various multi-verses to mingle -- or some such.

Now back to the review:

This time, the main character carries a welcome ethnic banner. Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) has black and Hispanic origins. Miles feels a little out-of-place at the private school to which his parents (dad is a cop) have sent him.

School aside, Miles starts the movie as an ordinary Brooklyn kid. He transforms into Spider-Man after being bitten by a radioactive spider. The bite occurs in an abandoned subway station that Miles visits with his Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), a free-spirited guy who Miles idolizes and who serves as a counterpoint to Miles conventional father.

A variety of other characters pop into the movie from other dimensions. They include Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn), Peter Porker (John Mulaney) and Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage). Porker, by the way, functions as a cartoon addition to this gang of Spidery characters and has an inspired alternate name: Spider-Ham.

You may find yourself blinking in mild but amused disbelief at the alternate universe Peter Parker, a Spider-Man who seems to have aged a decade and who has acquired a paunch.

All of these Spider-folks add to an approach that sets the movie several cuts above the expected. Getting rid of live action has resulted in one of the most creative Marvel movies yet with a plot that centers on the alternate-universe characters trying to return to their home dimensions.

My appreciation for the movie's spirit of invention never wavered; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse dazzles the eye and deservedly has put itself into contention as the year's top animated movie.

Credit goes to the directing team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, as wells as to screenwriter Phil Lord, who produced with his partner Chris Miller. And don't forget the legion of animators and effects specialists who have created this amazing contraption. Sitting through the end credits will tell you it takes more than a village to make this kind of movie; it takes an army.

Wes Anderson's distinctive 'Isle of Dogs'

Stop-action animation, a great voice cast, and strangely insular atmospherics make the director's latest appealing.

I’m not a total fan of Wes Anderson, the director whose work includes The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Express). But there’s no arguing that Anderson is one of the few directors working today who follows his imagination wherever it leads him. To enjoy his movies, you must accept his apparent unwillingness to curb his idiosyncrasies or to tailor his work to popular expectation. You must accept -- and perhaps even welcome -- what feels like the willed insularity of Anderson's world.

In Isle of Dogs — Anderson’s latest — the director employs stop-action animation to create a story in which a Japanese mayor banishes all the dogs in his city to an island where the city dumps its trash.

Every dog lover will recognize this as a horrible situation and Anderson doesn’t shrink from the inherent sadness of a society so cruel that it condemns a species that has done nothing to deserve being ostracized.

The city's authoritarian Mayor Kobayashi (voice by Kunichi Nomura) -- a lover of cats -- takes a sadistic approach to an epidemic of dog flu that turns once faithful companions into health hazards. Totally committed to his own power, Kobayashi refuses to change his mind even when a researcher develops a serum that will cure every flu-carrying pooch.

Although it feels all of a piece, Isle of Dogs is a linguistic mash-up. The abandoned dogs speak English and the Japanese characters speak Japanese (no subtitles). There's also an American exchange student who, of course, speaks English. A reporter for a high school newspaper, she crusades to topple Kobayashi's rule.

The animation is impeccable and creative — from doggie expressions to cityscapes to the forlorn trash heaps where the abandoned dogs roam. You'll also find outstanding voice work from Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Greta Gerwig and more.

Cranston’s mangy Chief may be the most distinctive of the dogs. A stray who doesn’t believe in trying to please humans, Chief warns others that he's not afraid to bite.

Sometimes when I watch an animated movie I can’t help trying to visualize the human actor behind the animated character.
Cranston’s voice is unmistakable, but — for the most part — I forgot about who might be doing the voice work and immersed myself in the visual environment Anderson and his team so ably create.

Anderson bows to Japanese film culture — often in humorous ways. At one point, for example, he employs a bit of the score from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai as a wry commentary on the action.

I wouldn't call Isle of Dogs a kids' movie, although it centers on 12-year-old Atari (Koyu Rankin), a boy who steals a small plane, crashes on Trash Island and winds up helping to rebuild a bridge between dogs and humans.

One question seems unavoidable: Does Anderson’s movie have a seriously deep meaning? Is it an allegory or simply another display of Anderson's eccentricity?

I’m not sure where I stand on the question, an uncertainty about Anderson's work that has bothered me before. But I also find his artistic expressions personal and intriguing, full of small touches that can be as pleasing as the film’s overall design.

Toward the end of the movie, a dog and his new family are served heaping bowls of red meat, something of an apology from the previously abusive humans. Each puppy gets the same food -- only in tiny bowls. I’m not entirely sure why this detail made me smile. Perhaps because it’s emblematic of Anderson's approach, placing irresistible bits of minutiae against backdrops that seem to have been created with something that might be called "cockeyed control."

Was he a contender or a pretender?

Liev Schreiber scores a knock-out in a so-so boxing picture about Chuck Wepner, the reputed real Rocky Balboa.

If I were considering making a movie about Chuck Wepner, the obscure New Jersey boxer who rose to sudden prominence when he fought Muhammad Ali in 1975, the last person I'd think of to play Wepner would be Liev Schreiber. Wepner was a hulk of a man whose native Bayonne left him with a raspy Jersey accent. Schreiber, on the other hand, has one of the most melodic and precise voices in show business.

But something about Wepner evidently caught Schreiber's fancy because he not only stars as Wepner in the new movie Chuck but serves as one of the movie's producers.

Schreiber knew what he was doing. His portrayal of Wepner, a boxer who was treated as the Rodney Dangerfield of boxing (no respect) is spot-on. Wepner was dubbed "the Bayonne bleeder," not exactly a moniker to strike fear in the hearts of opponents.

Schreiber ably captures the struggle that marked much of Wepner's life: He wanted to be somebody important -- not just a guy many regarded as a Bayonne-based club fighter.

For Wepner, a loss to Ali became a triumph as well as the reputed inspiration for Sylvester Stallone's Rocky. Wepner made it all the way to the fight's 15th round before Ali finished him off. Most sports people thought Wepner wouldn't survive three rounds.

Wepner became a kind of fill-in fight for Ali after the champ's fabled Rumble In the Jungle with George Foreman. But Wepner, who actually had a respectable pro record, became one of the few men ever to knock Ali down, landing The Greatest on his butt in round nine.

Director Philippe Falardeau (The Good Lie and Monsieur Lazhar) sets Wepner's story against the well-defined Jersey backdrop that bred Wepner and his pal John (Jim Gaffigan). The two men drink, snort cocaine and party hard enough to ruin Wepner's marriage to his wife Phyliss (a terrific Elisabeth Moss).

Wepner later meets Linda (Naomi Watts), the woman credited with helping him straighten out his life after a stint in the slammer. Wepner was busted for cocaine possession about 10 years after his championship bout.

Additional support is provided by Ron Perlman, as Wepner's manager, and Michael Rapaport as Wepner's disapproving brother. Rapaport's John hated the way the increasingly dissolute Wepner treated his daughter. Wepner always seemed to be seeking public adulation rather than accepting the love of those closest to him.

Perhaps in an effort to distinguish his movie from Hollywood's large boxing-movie card, Falardeau puts the big fight in the middle of the movie, devoting most of the Chuck's post-fight story to Wepner's precipitous, self-induced decline.

At one point, Wepner meets Sylvester Stallone. I had trouble buying Morgan Spector as Stallone; Pooch Hall makes a more credible Ali, but these are minor distractions in a movie in which every actor works overtime trying to capture his or her inner Jersey.

None of this is to say that Chuck makes it through its 98-minute running time without being bloodied. We've seen too many movies about the way lives were ruined by drugs during the 1980s. We've also seen too many movies about the way a boxer reaches a peak and then squanders any success he might have achieved. The great distinction with Wepner is that his stature derived from a loss.

The movie also belabors Wepner's obsession with movies. His favorite: 1962's Requiem for a Heavyweight, which starred Anthony Quinn as Louis "Mountain'' Rivera, a down-and-out pug who spent his time clinging to a dream about what he could have been. When Rocky becomes a smash, Wepner totally identifies himself with the movie, so much so that he thinks he deserves congratulations when Rocky wins an Oscar for best picture.

Wepner's delusions are meant to be sad, but by now, we've seen so many boxing films that chart rises, declines and redemptions that the scenario feels played out, almost to the point where there's not enough film to support its many fine performances.

Still, Schreiber's knock-out work may be enough to carry you through the movie, and Moss, familiar from TV's Mad Men, again proves that she's one of the most capable actresses around. Her Phyliss is not a woman to be messed with.

So, a reserved endorsement for Chuck. Like its main character, the movie stumbles and lumbers, but manages to survive.

No splash from predictable '5th Wave'

In what appears to be another hunt for franchise gold, The Fifth Wave is now reading across the nation's multiplexes. A big-screen adaptation of a 2013 novel by Rick Yancey, 5th Wave stars Chloe Grace Moretz as Cassie Sullivan, a high school student whose normal life is disrupted when an ominous alien spaceship appears above her Ohio hometown. Dull, predictable and, at times, laughable, The Fifth Wave turns Cassie into a quasi-action figure after she loses her parents; she's also put in a position where she must rescue her younger brother (Zackary Arthur) from soldiers who say (wink! wink!) that they're members of the US Army. Liev Schreiber portrays the commander who leads these supposedly helpful troops. Cassie eventually receives assistance from a hunky young man (Alex Roe), who learns about the girlish crush she once had on high school footballer Ben Parish (Nick Robinson). Just about every character seems to have been cut from typical YA cloth, and even the aliens are strictly off-the-rack: They're able to assume human form. Only Maika Monroe's Ringer brings any edge to the proceedings. She's a young woman who can out-tough any young man. Director J Blakeson occasionally allows the movie to fall into soporific lulls, and I wouldn't call it fun to see a perpetually troubled-looking Moretz running around with a semi-automatic weapon. Add a few medium-grade effects sequences depicting alien-induced catastrophes, and you wind up with a movie that may offer something to young fans of the novel and little for anyone else.

The Catholic Church meets the press

A compelling look at how the Boston Globe uncovered a scandal..

As the nation lumbers toward another major election, you can be sure that some of the candidates will be taking aim at the media. Many already have.

Tiresome as they may be, these inevitable anti-media rants make Spotlight -- a terrific movie about how the Boston Globe's investigative team uncovered sexual abuses by priests in Boston's archdiocese -- a must-see reminder that journalists can (and often do) make important contributions to the betterment of their communities.

Director Tom McCarthy builds his story around the Globe's Spotlight team, a quartet of reporters who were given time to develop and report stories that required deep digging.

Michael Keaton, who played a newspaper editor in Ron Howard's sometimes overlooked The Paper, returns to the ranks of ink-stained wretches as Walter "Robby" Robinson, the head of the Spotlight team.

The story of pedophile priests didn't really take hold until the Globe got a new editor in 2001. Marty Baron -- played in a masterfully collected performance by Liev Schreiber -- was a Jewish newcomer to Boston. Baron, who's now editor of the Washington Post, thought that the Globe had a responsibility to look at the failings of one of the city's most revered institutions.

McCarthy (Win Win, The Visitor, and The Station Agent) keeps a complicated story on track in ways that sustain interest even though we already know the outcome of this unseemly tale.

In a way that works for the story, Spotlight doesn't really have a main character. It's about individual commitment within a context of team work, a much-needed tribute to role players. There are no star turns in Spotlight; the movie that celebrates journeyman work on every level.

The Spotlight team is ably represented by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian D'Arcy.

Ruffalo portrays Michael Rezendes, an avid, monkish reporter who eventually won the confidence of Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), a lawyer who represented victims of church abuse. Initially mistrustful of the Globe, Garabedian had spent years trying to interest the paper in what he saw as wide-scale criminality within the church.

McAdams plays Sacha Pfeiffer; she's committed to the story but understands that it will shatter the church-centered world in which her grandmother -- like many Catholic Bostonians -- lives. Catholics made up 53 percent of the Globe's readership.

D'Arcy portrays James Matt Carroll. While working on the story, Carroll discovers that his own home isn't located far from a house where pedophile priests were hidden so that they could be "rehabilitated."

Billy Crudup portrays a lawyer who knows how to keep the lid on things by making settlements with victims; and Jamey Sheridan has a nice turn as a church attorney who wants to avoid scandal for what he deems a greater good: maintaining the order of things.

Len Cariou portrays Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, the church official who eventually was accused of covering up sexual abuses of priests in his archdiocese.

I don't normally like reviews that turn into lists of actors, but it's impossible not to acknowledge all of those who contributed to a fine ensemble cast, including John Slattery, who plays Ben Bradlee Jr., the editor who functions as Robinson's boss.

Spotlight's reach extends beyond the way journalists handle a complicated story, although it certainly shows the required grunt work. It's also about the way a community constructs a protective veneer around its valued institutions and how easy it is for lifelong members of that community to accept such facades as necessary and immutable.

McCarthy doesn't neglect the toll that the investigation takes on the journalists who are conducting it. Keaton, better and much less showy than he was in Birdman, wrestles with the conflicts generated by his varying identities and loyalties: journalist, Catholic and Bostonian.

We meet victims of priests who are conflicted about telling their story, sometimes because they've tried before and were met with indifference. We meet Boston bigwigs; and see what happens when a Cardinal tries to charm a newspaper editor who's not impressed by charm.

Spotlight bravely keeps its eye on truths that don't always make the Globe look good: The paper, we learn, had enough information to have begun reporting the story 20 years before it actually turned to the task.

Credit Spotlight for not imbuing its hardworking journalists with phony nobility, for not sensationalizing a tawdry story and for reminding us that journalists do more than, as some would have you believe, employ cheap tricks to play "gotcha" with politicians.

The adventures of an unlikely gigolo

John Turturro wrote and directed Fading Gigolo, a comedy built around the notion that attractive women would pay an obscure florist, played by Turturro, to have sex with them.

The movie's sexual antics, which take place with women played by Sharon Stone and Sofia Vergara, are supplemented by a more appealing strain of comedy.

Toward the end of the movie, Woody Allen -- who plays Turturro's pimp Murray -- is dragged before a court of Brooklyn-based Hasidic rabbis who charge him with corrupting the morals of a beautiful, gap-toothed widow (Vanessa Paradis).

Murray's troubles start when he convinces Paradis's Avigal, who's also a member of the Hasidic community, to visit Turturro's Fioravante.

In a series of tender massage scenes, Fioravante awakens the widow's dormant senses. Avigal begins to overcome her grief and isolation.

The odd relationship between Fioravante and Avigal displeases Dovi (Liev Schreiber). He's the leader of a Hasidic neighborhood crime patrol, and he wants to marry Avigal, who seems to have had a half dozen or so children.

Although Fading Gigolo qualifies as a bona fide mess, it contains moments that suggest how close Tuturro came to finding a tone that perfectly reflects the hodgepodge quality of contemporary life.

Perhaps to emphasize the notion of blurring ethnic boundaries, Allen's Murray lives with a black woman (Tonya Pinkins) who has four sons, a relationship that seems almost incidental to anything else in the film.

I say all of this as a way of expressing fondness for a movie that I can't defend as a success.

Turturro's Fioravante is a quiet, almost stoic man, perhaps the wrong main character in a film that (in my view) needed to surrender to its wackiness, to thoroughly embrace the comic humanity of a moment when so many lines are being erased and so many new lines have yet to be drawn.

The radicalizing of a Pakistani

It's probably impossible to discuss The Reluctant Fundamentalist -- director Mira Nair's big-screen adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel -- without at least mentioning the recent bombings at the Boston Marathon. I mention this because Nair's movie poses a topical and eerily relevant question: What might make a highly educated and apparently assimilated Pakistani immigrant wind up opposing everything about the U.S.?

Nair tells the story through a framing device. Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani professor, meets with a self-described American journalist (Liev Schreiber) in a Lahore cafe. Schreiber's character believes Changez may be able to help locate a kidnapped American.

We soon discover that the story is less interested in the captured American than in allowing Changez to explain how he made the journey from a hot-shot investment banker with a premier Wall Street firm to a radicalized college professor in Pakistan. Changez, we learn, not only lived in the U.S., but availed himself of its greatest opportunities. He graduated from Princeton, and quickly landed on the fast-track to wealth.

Changez tells Schreiber's Bobby the story of events that transformed him from a ruthless takeover artist to an academic who sees a link between the brutalities of capitalism and the world of religious fundamentalism.

If such a connection makes sense, The Reluctant Fundamentalist doesn't succeed in convincing us: The screenplay seems to find some sort of moral equivalence between capitalist ravishments and terrorist slaughter. The idea seems more like a fatuous reach than a devastating insight.

Having said that, it also should be noted that Ahmed gives a terrific performance as a young man learning the American ropes, which at first pull him upward and then threaten to strangle him. Ahmed's avid, intelligent performance holds the movie together, even as the story takes some less-than-credible turns.

The most notable of these unfortunate detours involves the relationship Changez establishes with a photographer named Erica, a mousey looking Kate Hudson. Erica eventually mounts an exhibit of photographs that she believes to be personal and revealing, but which mostly put her post 9/11 bigotry on display.

September 11 and the subsequent change of American attitudes give rise to prejudices that can't help but impact Changez. He's strip-searched at an airport. He's wrongly questioned by the New York City police. He begins to understand that no matter how assimilated he believes himself to be, he can't overcome the bigoted assumptions of those who identify him with terrorism.

Ahmed's fine performance is supplemented by equally strong work from Kiefer Sutherland, as Changez's boss and mentor at the investment banking firm. And it's always nice to see the fine Indian actor Om Puri, even when he's underutilized. He plays Changez's father.

Nair (Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake) keeps the story flowing. She's good at mixing milieu and character and giving material the involving sweep of a novel.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers some -- if not all -- of the richness of a novelistic story. But in the end, political reductionism undermines the story's human richness, and Nair manages to give us only flashes of the major work The Reluctant Fundamentalist might have been.

A tough guy with a heart of gold

Goon's main character is as endearing as he is brutal.

Given the recent and overdue attention that has been drawn to the dangers of fighting in hockey -- concussions, depression and even suicides -- I felt a bit guilty enjoying Goon, a comedy about Doug Glatt, a thug who fights his way through a career in hockey's minor-league backwaters.

Based on a true story, Goon is funny, poignant and bruising, a look at a shy brawler with a sense of decency and decorum. As played by Seann William Scott, best known for his portrayal of Stifler in the American Pie movies, Glatt comes off as a misfit who finds his calling when he learns that he can give and take a punch, a talent that seems to take him by surprise and pushes his life into a whole new sphere.

Goon inevitably will be compared to the 1977 comedy Slap Shot, but it stands on its own, and it takes Doug much more seriously than Slap Shot took its three iconic enforcers, the notorious Hansen brothers. For a movie that doesn't skimp on hockey violence, Goon also has heart, thanks mostly to a surprisingly effective performance by Scott, who plays his character straight. Glatt, a self-acknowledged dumb guy, embarrasses his staunchly middle class family, a doctor father (a convincingly serious Eugene Levy) and a doctor brother (David Paetkau), who also happens to be gay.

Watching Goon -- which is as rife with vulgar humor as with hockey fights -- I wondered if I'd underestimated Scott's abilities. He creates one of the most soulful thugs in recent screen history, a guy who you can't help but like -- for his awkwardness, his naivety and the apologetic way he goes about almost everything in his life. And to his credit: Scott never winks at the audience to let us know that he's really smarter than the character he's playing.

Doug, who plays hockey for the Halifax Highlanders, becomes a minor star in the world of minor-league hockey. Doug the Thug, as he's known, shares an apartment with Xavier Laflamme (Marc-Andre Grondin), a highly skilled hockey player who took a major hit that so unnerved him, it brought his NHL career to a end and shipped him back to the minors. Laflamme resents Glatt's rising popularity. He knows Glatt has only one skill: He can fight.

But what Lafalmme doesn't quite get is that Doug has more than a rock hard head and fists to match; he's loyal, eager to please, and genuinely wants to protect his teammates. In short, he's got character, something which Laflamme -- for all his skills -- can't match.

Perfectly cast by director Michael Drowse, Goon features some tasty small roles. Jay Baruchel plays Glatt's buddy, a fast-talking, foul-mouthed host of a ragtag hockey show called Hot Ice. And Alison Pill brings grounded credibility to the role of Eva, a hockey groupie who catches Doug's eye.

A scene between Glatt and rival thug Ross Rhea (Liev Schrieber) is as good as any I've seen this year. The two players meet by accident in a diner. The older Rhea, who's on his way out of the game, schools the up-and-coming Glatt in a scene that's smart, hard-hitting and smartly acted by Schreiber, who's close to unrecognizable as a long-haired enforcer who has spent his adult life knocking out opposing players.

Goon has enough commitment to its unglamorous milieu to keep it from becoming one more raunchy comedy. Drowse -- and his cinematographer Bobby Shore -- make the hockey scenes exciting, and they don't spare anyone's feelings when it comes to showing the brutality of the fights.

Stick around for the credits for a look at some of the fights of the real Doug Glatt, who was known as "The Hammer."

Look, I prefer hockey without fights, but as the story of a fighter with heart, Goon lands a solid punch.

'Origins' explores Wolverine's beginnings

I'm not an X-Men junkie. I can't tell you whether "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" will please those who've immersed themselves in the comic-book series. But as someone whose seen the "X-Men" movies, I can tell you that "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" generates enough heat to keep its heroic mutants on Hollywood's payroll.

Switching gears from his work in "Rendition," director Gavin Hood takes the helm of the series to tell us how Wolverine finds his way to mutant stardom. Hood tends toward streamlined thinking, clinging to the basics of comic-book filmmaking. He steeps "Origins" in bellicose melodrama, amped-up action and fleet editing. The movie clocks in at a reasonable 97 minutes.

Hood also embraces (perhaps too eagerly) the excesses of the comic-book form, and he seldom misses an opportunity to show off Hugh Jackman's torso. I know a woman who plans to see "Origins" only because of Jackman. She'll see a lot of him. At one point he appears in the buff, turning into Nude-o-rine, a mutant streaking across a green meadow. Wolverine seems to have no trouble finding time -- even during the most difficult situations -- to strip down to his T-shirt for a fight. Mostly, Jackson seems to be acting or flexing, which in this movie probably amounts to roughly the same thing.

Liev Schreiber makes a welcome addition to the cast. He portrays Victor Creed, the mutant who eventually turns into Sabertooth. Creed is Wolverine's brother, an animalistic mutant who embraces his status as something that sets him apart from the rest of society, particularly in areas concerning morals. A tightly edited opening credits sequence marches through several wars. Besides learning that mutants can recover from wounds that would kill any human -- a handy skill -- we see that Creed has no compunction about killing innocent people. He's the living, breathing dark side of the mutant force, and Wolverine constantly struggles to prove that he's not like his bad-boy brother.

Besides Shreiber, the biggest additions to the story are Danny Huston (as a rogue general) and Lynn Collins (as a teacher with whom Jackman's character becomes romantically involved when he flees government service and tries to live normally). Wolverine's attempt at domesticity does not involve a leap into some manicured U.S. suburb. He works as a lumberjack in Canada and lives in an isolated cabin atop a mountain bordered by spectacular cliffs. Collins' characters shares Wolverine's humble abode, but her role doesn't amount to much. Huston, on the other hand, seems sharp as a twisted military man who sees the mutants as potential WMDs.

In movies such as "Origins," government almost always can be counted on to do the wrong thing. At a time when polls tells us that most Americans are thinking positively about the present administration, this mistrust of official power may not resonate as loudly as it has in previous editions. Perhaps to compensate, "Origins" adds psychological gloss to its anti-government posturing; father/son conflicts and sibling rivalries dominate. Don't look for depth, though: These issues are so clearly pasted onto the movie's surface, they might as well be labeled.

If you seek out "Origins" do it because of your devotion to the boldness of its comic-book conceits and for a backgrounder on how Logan became Wolverine. I'm not suggesting that "Origins" is without logical flaws, but overall it computes, and it builds toward an ending that features a nice ironic touch. (I wish Hood hadn't bothered with a short scene that's dropped into the end credits. It ties up a loose end that didn't need tying and gives the movie an unneeded moral slant. I also could have done with one less agonized scream from Wolverine, who seems to drop to his knees and howl every time he hears tragic news.)

Hood, who won an Oscar for his South African movie "Tsotsi,'' keeps the pacing tight, and seldom wavers from his obligation to give the audience a mega-helping of Jackman. Buffed and ready, Jackman serves the role well, although I'm not sure he has the depth that a different actor might have brought to the proceedings. Maybe it doesn't matter. This isn't a movie that suggests; it screams its thoughts out loud, carrying them right into some typically bloated end-of-picture action.

"Origins" is not big on astonishing revelations. We learn how Jackman got those retractable metal claws -- devices that seemed hard to square with any known facts about evolution. Mostly, though, "Origins" takes familiar "X-Men" themes, and laces them throughout this look backward. Can mutants harness their powers for the good of mankind? Should they?

The action sequences are mostly good if overly abundant, and, with a couple of exceptions, the special effects are fine. I don't know whether "Origins" has blockbuster potential, and its tethered to the a problem most origin movies face: It must march us toward a conclusion that we've known from the outset. Still, "Origins" does enough to ensure that the series doesn't topple from its perch as a mainstay of our comic-book culture. Is it great? No. But I'd be wary of those who insist on sharpening their claws on it.