A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, and I had this discussion the day after the Wolverine movie came out. (I caught a midnight showing, not having anything much to do the next day.) All things considered, it was a generic action B-movie. Nothing special. A lot of people are panning it for a lack of creativity. While that is certainly a valid critique, one ought to remember that the film starts off in the difficult position of having to work as a prequel to a very well-established universe. We all know how it ends, and so the only way to have made it a remarkable film is to make the journey worthwhile, something contemporary American cinema is notoriously bad at. Let me now take a few lines to shamelessly quote io9's review of the film, focusing on the single most ridiculous aspect of the film (and trust me, there are many). SPOILERS. ---------- There are really two kinds of dumb movies: ones where you don't notice the plot holes until you're out in the parking lot afterwards, and ones where you can't concentrate on the explosions because you're sitting there saying "WTF" to yourself over and over. Wolverine is the second kind. I particularly love the overly twisty plot that military goon William Stryker hatches: He goes all over the world to get hold of some adamantium, a metal so strong it could only come from both outer space and Africa. Having gone to so much trouble, he decides he wants to inject this rare metal into Wolverine's bones. But for some reason, he can't just strap Wolverine down and do this - because the procedure is so painful, Wolverine has to volunteer. (Pause for a moment and reflect that Wolverine is not super-strong. Straps and chains actually do stop him, right?) So Stryker gets his mutant super-agent Kayla to pretend to be in love with Wolverine for a year or two, then he gets Wolverine's half-brother Victor to pretend to kill Kayla. All this, so Wolverine will agree to lose his ability to walk through metal detectors ever again. And then, as soon as Wolverine actually gets the metal in his skeleton, Stryker has some half-assed plan to erase his memory. And when that doesn't work out, he immediately decides to kill the guy he just spent half a billion dollars putting the world's rarest metal into. Instead of, I dunno, talking it out. Does any of this make sense to any of you? It's so nutty the stock army general, General Exposition, comments on how nutty it is. ----------