X-Men Origin: Wolverine (12A)

THE world's three most thankless jobs?

Amy Winehouse's tooth and hoof scrubber. That poor sod, weeping in a lonely edit suite somewhere, who has to watch the raw tapes of Katie & Peter: Stateside.

And last but not least? Any director who takes on a much-loved comic book franchise. Epic paycheque aside, it's a lose-lose situation.

Rework the source material for the mainstream, and you get torn to shreds by the online sunlight-dodgers months before the film's even finished.

Try too hard to please the comic book fans, and you could end up with a laughable folly like Watchmen.

Yet sometimes they have been known to go right. Take Iron Man. Take Hellboy 2. Take, above all others, the piece of kickass cinema that is The Dark Knight.

Three films where brave directors took everything that mattered about the comics, ditched the rest, and ran with it in their own unique direction.

That's what Gavin 'Tsotsi' Hood has done with this long-awaited X-Men prequel.

And has it worked? W-e-l-l, first, the good news. For everyone whose eyes misted over during the £145million clown show that was X-Men: The Last Stand, forget the cheesy lines and low-rent fights - this is the X-Men movie you want.

Hugh Jackman IS Wolverine, in all his cigar-chomping, claw-handed, lumberjack-on-protein-shakes glory.

The story picks up in "Canada", 1845 - that's 22 years before Canada was founded, ya spanners - with young Wolvie witnessing a family tragedy alongside his talon-fingered elder half- brother Victor.

The pair flee, and a great montage sequence kicks in, tracking the brothers through the American Civil War, the Somme trenches, the D-Day landings and a helicopter strike on Vietnam.

It's stylish, tough, and marks out Wolverine's territory like wee on bushes - a sort of Hulk crossed with Rambo thingie, with a sprinkling of Dark Knight grit on top. Ditto the Nigeria-set segment that follows, in which adult Wolverine and Victor (played brilliantly by Liev Schreiber) join a military-sponsored team of fellow mutants to take on a Lagos diamond-smuggling op.

It's a riveting blockbuster sequence, which also neatly introduces the new players: From pick-of-the-bunch Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), a fast-talking, sword-swinging assassin who can slice speeding bullets in half, to makeweight fatso The Blob, played by Kevin Durand.

Big bro Vic gets a taste for the violence, but Wolverine loathes it. So the two part ways, until six years later, when Wolvie's ladyfriend Kayla (Lynn Collins) crosses paths with Victor.

By now he's fallen into the employ of villainous Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston), on a mission to round up the world's mutants for a shadowy military programme called "Weapon X".

It's at this point (set around 20 years before the first X-Men film starts, continuity buffs) that the story proper kicks in, with Wolverine falling into, and then escaping from the programme, all while wearing the tightest jeans in Christendom. And in all honesty? It's a mixed bag. When director Gavin Hood has the chops to go his own way, it borders on brilliant.

Jackman lives the role, and makes a decent fist of giving Wolvie some emotional depth.

And his escape from the Weapon X facility, capped with a naked waterfall dive, is a real highlight (and I say that as a straight male who was in no way confused by this sequence, where you could see his sweaty, rippling chest and muscly thighs and everything).

Liev Schreiber, as mentioned, is top notch. And fans of the comic will appreciate a couple of short-but-sweet appearances by drawling card shark Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) and a note- perfect young Cyclops (Tim Pocock). Making it all the more disappointing that a fair bit of the rest of the film is less X than Y, Y, Y? Biggest culprit? The entire final battle and escape sequence.

It's pulled right out of chapter 12 of Blockbusters For Dummies, this one - just after the bit where they tell you to cut between storylines to keep the audience up to speed, but before the bit where they say not to bother if it wrecks the flow and patronises viewers into the dirt.

Other offences include an annoying Wolverine Jr, Deadpool's pointless involvement in the twisty "transformation" at the end, and the appearance of a Black Eyed Pea in the supporting cast (Black Eyed Pea Off, mate).

Plus, unforgivably, the two (count 'em, two!) moments where someone cradles a dead body, throws their head back, stares into an overhead camera and shouts "nooooooo".

All are clumsy missteps that stop Wolverine being the prime piece of work that it could, and probably should, have been.

But it's both a solid addition to the superhero list and a perfectly enjoyable watch that leaves the door pleasingly open for another X-Men prequel.

So claws crossed that next time, Wolvie's bite might live up to his impressive bark. (Out Wednesday)

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