‘Wolverine’ Trailer Spoils Revelation Of Last Act Villain ‘Weapon XI’- Sorry, Nation’s Twelve Year Olds

It was bound to happen- the thoughtful, respectably handled original “X-Men” from Bryan Singer would eventually lead to this, the overstuffed, ridiculous looking “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” that embraces the ludicrous mythology of the Wolverine character as if it was the freakin’ Torah. On the heels of this USA Today piece that discusses the making of the movie in brief, lobotomized USA Today-sized snippets comes the ridiculous final trailer that features pretty much the entire film in one four minute clip.

“Wolverine” tells the story of the X-Men mutant Logan in his earlier years, as he volunteered for a Canadian government operation to give him an indestructible adamantium skeleton to later join a strike force which may include the above pictured mutant, New Orleans-based hoodlum Gambit (Taylor Kitsch)- why is he in Canada, again? What this trailer reveals, however, is that the program seems designed to abduct other mutants, including Cyclops of the original Xfilms, and use their abilities to create a new supermutant, who in the trailer is shown to have the abilities of both Wolverine and Cyclops, as well as no doubt other mutants. This sounds like something that survived from previous drafts of the script, in that Wolverine, designated Weapon X, eventually fights a heavily powered superhuman dubbed Weapon XI. This is probably the top secret character played by Scott Adkins, a straight-to-DVD action star who also briefly showed up in “The Bourne Ultimatum” and, as a martial artist, probably won’t have many lines.

This is just yet another attempt to damn movie continuity while trying to stuff this doomed enterprise with as much action as possible. If the technology exists to combine the abilities of several mutants into one and have him work for the government, wouldn’t that be an eventual game-changer for the humans, since “Wolverine” seems to take place in the seventies, and the “X-Men” films take place in the “near future” (meaning, also, that James Marsden was playing a fortysomething)? Whatever the case, this looks cheap, melodramatically acted and decidedly unexcting. Click here for USA Today’s “Wolverine” photo slideshow, where we see more of that noted action star Will.I.Am among other cast members looking serious while surrounded by photoshopped CGI fog.