Pacquaio vs. Wolverine

This weekend played host to two media events of significance to males aged 15-35. The first, many contend, was over too soon, the second, personally, took two hours too long. Both included lots of rock'em sock'em action, the old-school nitty-gritty... blood, sweat and...

Ahurm. First was the Pacquia-Hatton fight. The big one. I love Pacquiao fights, because when he's on, I can turn off my TV, go out for a nice relaxing drive and lunch, and not have to put up with annoying crowds and traffic. It's not that I'm not interested in the fight, far from it, but I don't have pay-per-view, and listening to the fight on the radio is never as satisfying as watching the replay that inevitably comes on when I get home, so, at the very moment "The Hitman" hits the canvas for the third and final time, I'm in the shoe section of the department store.

The buzz of conversation, even here, where salespeople are thicker than shoppers (yes, the fight really does thin out weekend crowds, even on a payday weekend), is Manny, Manny, Manny. The Pac-Man is the Philippine equivalent of Elvis, though you wouldn't play his music at your wedding. And while Manny's philanthropic sprees don't quite match Elvis's Cadillac giveaways... they come close.

To be fair, though, Elvis really isn't all that great an actor, either, and he's definitely no action hero. Manny, on the other hand, has beaten the best of the world, and has beaten them so badly it seems like they aren't even trying. Even then, life in the Philippines comes to a stand-still every time he knocks another hapless foreigner out cold.

The sight of Manny standing triumphantly erect over the flaccid, pale body of the British hometown hero probably has some historical or symbological significane, but to many fans, it simply means that he's proven that he's "it". No longer can you question whether he can fight at this weight class (dela Hoya was visibly over-the-hill in that last fight), but you question whether any of the other mugs in this class can last all twelve rounds with the Pac-man.

Another superhero moment this weekend was the premiere of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This one featured a similarly buff Hugh Jackman in some similarly exciting action, but despite outlasting the measly two-and-a-half-minute Pacquiao-Hatton match by an hour and a half, the movie fell flat on its face.

Granted, prequels often struggle to match the excitement of the originals... take Star Wars, for instance... you know Anakin Skywalker = Darth Vader... and neither he nor Obi-Wan Kenobi are ever in any real danger of dying or being horribly disfigured over the course of Star Wars I-III... oh... Anakin is, but you know how horribly disfigured he's going to be... so any time he gets a limb lopped off, your only reaction is: "Oh, so that's how that happened..."

With Wolverine, we know from the first three movies that his skeleton has been implanted with an indestructible metal, he's lost his memory, and that he's really got it in for this guy called Stryker. Oh, and he hates Sabretooth. Thus, we know that none of the three are likely to die, Wolverine will suffer one of the most excrutiating bondage and torture scenes in cinema, and he will forget absolutely everything that happens here... although how everyone else from the other three movies who plays a part here forgets him is an even bigger mystery.

The movie starts out in grand fashion, showing the origin of Sabretooth and Wolverine, segueing to a montage of their lives over the past century, fighting in every military action engaged in by the United States... strange, I thought they were Canadian... Too bad they left out Captain America during the World War Two sequence... leading up to their recruitment by Stryker for a special ops team, which Wolverine, here, still called "James", then quits in disgust over all the killing. Strange, he didn't have a problem with that part before.

This leads to a romantic interlude with a schoolmarm up in the Canadian wilderness. Now, this may be a bit spoiler-ish, but obviously, Wolverine doesn't have this girl, anymore, which means that she is either going to die, or going to betray him, because for all his traipsing around the world afterwards, she never shows up again (at least, in the movies). So we get exactly what we expect, a bloody betrayal, a revenge plot and the creation of the iconic Wolverine.

And this is where the plot collapses in a mess of Machiavellian manipulation, wasted cameos and sillier-than-comic book logic. The fights are pretty enough, but the computer graphics are glaringly bad, at times... most notably when our hero has his metal claws out, which is most of the movie. Patrick Stewart's brief cameo has him looking so face-liftingly tight that I wondered, at first, if he was another figment of the computer's imagination. The attempts to tie this flick into the current movie mythology while staying reasonably true to the comic book mythology seem strained. Especially woeful is the introduction of Wolverine's classic jacket and motorbike-look, neither of which he has (nor remembers having) at the end.

While Hugh Jackman's half-naked physique is arguably more impressive than Pacquiao's, and his patented muttonchops are certainly the better hair arrangement, not even his muscular buttocks (lovingly showcased in the first half of the movie) can save this film from its ultimate mediocrity. "Wolverine" is too poorly scripted, too poorly paced and too cliched. The best movies are like a good boxing match, there's drama, tension, and a sense that you don't really know what's coming next, but you know that it's going to be good. In fact, even if you know who's going to win, eventually, the fight itself will be a nail-biter.

But all that I was biting was my tounge... to distract me from the distinct pain of watching the cinema destroy one of the more interesting comic book characters so thoroughly that not even his mutant healing factor can save this flick.

Not as thoroughly as Pacquiao destroyed Hatton though. While Wolverine woke up and walked away before the credits started rolling, Ricky Hatton, much wiser than the be-clawed Canuck, decided to sleep them out.

Pac-Man 1 : Mutants 0