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X-Men Origins: Wolverine is what happens when complete ineptitude is allowed to run rampant over a good idea. Spoilers ahead, not that it matters.

This movie represents every problem I have ever had with Wolverine writ large. He talks mean but never backs it up. He doesn’t just heal, he’s nigh invincible. He doesn’t just have heightened senses, he’s able to hear a comment muttered from across a room through a pane of reinforced glass and a tank of water. He does this having recently come back from the dead. He is the most interesting thing on screen at all times not because he is actually interesting, but because the writers, producers, effects artists, and director decided to neglect absolutely everything and everyone else.

This movie is like a Monet in reverse. It gets uglier the farther away I get from it.

The rushed and confusing opening scene takes us to 1845, when a young Logan’s powers first manifest in a moment of great emotional distress. His claws pop out and he accidentally kills his father. Or maybe the guy wasn’t his father. I’m baffled as to what happened in these weirdly mishandled four minutes, but Logan and his brother, Victor Creed (who, although the name is never used, is supposed to be a re-imagined Sabretooth, never mind that he can’t possibly be the same Sabretooth from the original X-Men, ARE YOU STILL WITH ME?) decide that they must run away from home and become mercenaries. Logan and Victor proceed to montage their way through every major American (of course?) conflict from the the Battle of Bunker Hill to the Tet Offensive.

One hundred and fifty years of warfare could make for some great story, but we’re finished with it by the time the opening credits stop rolling. Aside from one of the movie’s few clever lines of dialogue, these fifteen decades of mass murder go without comment. The critical problem with Wolverine is that it skips everything interesting in the man’s life. Rather than build an interesting back story or an engaging character arc, the movie, like all the worst comics, proceeds on the assumption that the mere presence of Wolverine is enough to keep the audience interested. Likewise, we get what feels like five dozen cameos from characters who are only interesting if you already know who they are supposed to be. The film presents them to you without any effort at interpretation, embellishment, or depth. Look! Here’s Gambit! He can do card tricks, and has a stick, so you know he’s Gambit. Kind of. And now! A fight! Cheri! And Gambit, away!  Whoosh.

Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber (Sabretooth) should be given serious credit for doing a good job with execrable material. Danny Huston, bless his tightly cropped hair, should not. His William Stryker is wooden and crass, possessing none of Brian Cox’s deliciously smooth malevolence. Brian Cox’s Stryker was like a fine aged whiskey. Painful and damaging, yes, but full of subtle notes that always made you want more. Danny Huston is PBR. A cheap pantomime of the real thing that can’t even do its job right.

Wolverine is equal parts boring and inconsistent. Hugh Jackman moves from fight to fight with no sense of rising action and a truly poor resolution to this non-climax. The ultimate villain is a faceless, voiceless, characterless Frankenstein wielding an amalgam of stolen powers. This cheap device is the refuge of lazy video game designers and twelve year-old fantasy writers. And how do the writers of Wolverine explain his memory loss at the start of X-Men? Adamantium bullets. Because although Wolverine’s brain can heal from an adamantium slug, his memories don’t grow back. What? Are you telling me that in 150 years of war, Wolverine never once sustained a head injury? This kind of laziness is just insulting.

Speaking of insulting, did you catch that cameo from Professor Xavier? The one where he walks out of a helicopter? You heard me. I said walks.

Okay, folks. It’s time for you and I to do a little call and response. I say “Xavier,” you say “Chair.”

Xavier.

Chair.

Xavier!

Chair!

Xavier!

CHAIR!

Whatever the hell walked off that helicopter to rescue young Cyclops and the other assorted mutant extras was not Professor Charles Xavier. Charles Xavier does not exist without a wheelchair. It is what makes his character iconic, what allows him to transcend the pages of the comic and reach the reader as the absolute archetype of mind over matter, of brain over body. In a universe of spandex and exaggerated musculature, Xavier manages to be a mutant powerhouse from the understated calm of a three piece suit and a wheelchair.

All of this collapses the instant that Xavier stands up. Now he has no physical deficit to counterbalance his overwhelming intellectual might. This is the incomplete Xavier, who might have heard that the world is an unfair place, but doesn’t understand what that truly means. He hasn’t experienced it firsthand yet. His legs are the price he has paid for unparalleled mental powers, a permanent reminder that nothing in this world comes free. His injury taught him what it was to be visibly different and vulnerable, as so many mutants are. This grants him empathy, and it is one thing (perhaps the the only thing) that separates him from his great adversary. It also forced humility on him, and taught him how to live with weakness until it was no weakness at all. On a good pair of legs, he’s just a cunning manipulator with suspicious amounts of money and a charming accent, utterly untouched by hardship. He’s a pretentious, dangerously overconfident chrome dome with a PhD who for some reason refuses to be called “Doctor.”

The wheelchair is integral to the character. Pulling him out of it simply to signify that we are “in the past” is an unforgivable mistake. It also didn’t help that the unnecessary CGI youth formula made Patrick Stewart look like he was made of pancake batter. I mean, why bother? The bulk of the story takes place perhaps ten years prior to X-Men, and Patrick Stewart looks basically the same. Just let the man be.

Xavier’s cameo tells you everything you need to know about the ineptitude of this movie. The cursory and grotesquely inappropriate treatment of Xavier bespeaks much more than lazy writing. It demonstrates a staggering disregard for the substance of X-Men and a profound misunderstanding of why people have remained dedicated to these comics for the better party of fifty years.

It would not have been hard for Wolverine to be a good movie. The Dark Knight proved that summer blockbusters can be propelled not just by big explosions, but big ideas. Iron Man (which, similar to Wolverine, was last summer’s innaugural flick) showed that a middling story can be surprisingly entertaining if you give a talented actor something to do besides grimace and lunge. But fine, thanks. Please, continue to ruin a franchise that looked unstoppable in 2003.