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By: Ikedi Ani-okoye

An intellectually dead movie, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" survives, perhaps unsurprisingly, entirely on its action thrills, all of which are satisfactory even for the connoisseur.

Quite uninvolving emotionally, the revenge motive now having long-ago played out its impact in modern film, the whole scenario, like many retro-fittings of thrillers of the past 35 years or so, will spellbind only the videogame set who demand little beyond eye candy.

With some pretty zippy dialogue at the beginning, I was ready to hand the film some praise just for peppering us with a verbal flair. And after darting through time over 164 years, the fast-paced time travel is pretty breathtaking. And later, one must concede that the surgery operation which creates the X-man is, in terms of sensational action films, quite impressive. But then it just becomes common, with most of its big-budgeted visuals cheap in their conception.

Originating in the pages of Marvel Comics, this is now the prequel to the series. Created decades ago through writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, it first appeared in September of 1963. The concept was that a certain Professor Xavier, trying to show that human mutants could be a benefit to humanity, invented the X-Men, so-called because they and only they possessed the "x-gene" and, referring to the Roman numeral X for the Arabic 10, gave X-men their name. With that gene he could create super humans. In particular, there was Angel, Iceman, Cyclops, Beast and Jean Grey.

In time, others were to join the team, but others left, depending on their popularity at the box office. Cyclops proved to be the strongest and therefore the longest lasting. The ethnicity of the characters was politically corrected over the years.

Soon enough, X-Men were covered by all media: an animated television series, video games, and, of course, a successful series of films. Then came the team's arch enemy, Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who became the obligatory and regular action opponents.

So, in this prequel, in 1845 the prologue intros us to two mutants: Logan (Hugh Jackman), whose knuckles are equipped with retractable razor-sharp fangs which are not only indestructible but will slice by any known material instantly, and his older, less stable brother Victor (Liev Schreiber). Their superhuman strength and capacity for self-repair and regeneration gives them involvement in the Civil War, WWI, WWII and Vietnam.

In more modern times, a meteorite falls somewhere in Nigeria and reveals a chunk of an indestructible metal called adamantium. The sinister Col. William Stryker (Danny Huston) secures it and recruits Logan and his brother for a top secret unit known as Team X.

It's taken little to get Logan rearward into action since Victor is responsible for his brother's girlfriend Kayla's (Lynn Collins) death. This seals Logan's revenge mission to slay his brother, thus inducing him to submit to the Stryker experiment in which Stryker will blend Logan's skeleton with the super-strong adamantium, making him invincible. But Stryker, Logan realizes soon enough, is of pure evil.

Logan will try for a reunion, however awkward, with some of his former Team X buddies, including teleporter John Wraith (Will.i.am) and now 600-pound Fred Dukes (Kevin Durand), aka the Blob, now to get going with the helicopter crashes, motorcycle chases, hand-to-hand, impalements and the like.

Because of its undeniable craftsmanship and creatively brutal action, let's allow the film a fair-to-middlin' score. But for those who like to walk away from any movie with a sense of knowing or realizing something new, this film is a massive zero.