Back in 1994, I was working as a squeegee man at one of the multiple poorly timed red lights near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. However, no matter how many windshields I left streak marks on, I just couldn’t get enough singles from scared white people in gray Saabs to put down the first and last on a (very) uptown studio apartment. Desperate to get ahead, me and my doo rag started hanging outside the entrance of the stock exchange, asking them chaps if they got any hot tips. One day, I finally got a response other than a nervous, guilty smile. “JDS Uniphase, bro!” exclaimed a stout Irish-looking fella. I flashed him a thumbs-up, and the next day I put my entire pickle jar of life savings into the equity shares of that esteemed corporation.

Fast forward to February 2000. The stock’s meteoric rise has finally afforded me ample funds to do the only thing I ever wanted to do… take the South Bronx chapter of the North American League of Toni Collette Fans on the trip of a lifetime to Australia!!! I sold my shares to my douchebag brother, and watched glowingly as the stock immediately crashed from its heavenly heights back to the hellish depths from which it came.

Come July, we were en route to Sydney, Toni’s hometown, and settled in for our 22-hour Qantas flight out of LaGuardia. Now, before I tell the rest of this story, there’s something you need to understand about Toni Collette fans. There’s two camps: those who believe Muriel’s Wedding is her premier effort (heroes) and those who believe that distinction belongs to The Sixth Sense (a-holes). Unfortunately, the Great Neck chapter of Toni’s fan club was also on board the flight, and they are world famous Sixth Sens-ers. By the time we were over Albany, we were already getting catty with the skinny bitches from the North Shore. When they poked fun at Toni’s much more voluptuous figure in Muriel’s Wedding, it crossed the line. Fists flew.

Luckily, for the structural integrity of the aircraft cabin’s sake, Australia’s second brightest star, Hugh Jackman, was also aboard. He had just completed the American leg of the promotional tour for the first X-Men film, and was beat after a rough interview with Craig Kilborn the prior evening. Being the mench that he is though, he left his luxurious first-class accommodations up front to enter the violent fray in coach, pleading with all for a peaceful resolution. When that failed, he pulled me off the young lad whose eyes I were attempting to gouge out, as I screamed “Good luck seein’ dead people now!”

Huey (as I found out he prefers to be addressed) and I chatted for hours on end. I spilled my guts to him, as I reclined in his former seat and he happily crouched down in the aisle next to me, with one elbow on his knee and the other on the armrest. He never stopped smiling and nodding, holding on to my every word. He soon confessed that he too was partial to Muriel’s Wedding. He then had an idea. He whispered in my ear, and then approached the stewardess, who proved powerless against his charm. Within moments, “Dancing Queen”, Muriel’s favorite tune, was blasting over the aircraft speakers. The South Bronx chapter reorganized back in coach, singing and dancing like there’s no tomorrow, properly humbling the arrogant Sixth Sens-ers.

We weren’t done though. Right at the “You can dance!” lyrical climax, we all sang the line and pointed at Jackman, who had settled back into his seat. He acted coy at first, pointing at his chest while sporting a wry smirk. But if there’s two things he can do, it’s sing his ass off, and dance his ass off. He joined in on the epic multi-national disco party taking place over the North Pacific, soon followed by his first class cohorts Vince Carter and Kevin Garnett, en route to Sydney for the Olympics.

So while I harbor nothing but good feelings toward Hugh Jackman, it doesn’t necessitate that I approve of his latest cinematic effort, The Wolverine. I did approve, however, of the wonderfully patriotic opening scene, where America’s finest airmen nuke the living hell out of Nagasaki. Jackman’s character, Logan (the Wolverine), is holed up in an underground well doubling as POW solitary confinement. Logan inexplicably decides to hone in on and save one of the thousands of Japanese soldiers that are about to fry, apparently harboring no ill-will toward his evil captors. Though the sequence of events seemed a bit contrived and odd, I wasn’t really worrying about that, as I was in the midst of organizing a massive “USA!” chant throughout the theater to celebrate the mushroom cloud that we just unleashed against Emperor Hiro-shit-o.

We then flash forward to the present day, where the ageless Logan has apparently retired unceremoniously from his former superhero gig. We know this because he has moved to the quiet solitude of the wilderness and grown a bushy beard, i.e. what every former hero now shunned by society does in a cliché action movie. When questioned about why he doesn’t attempt to recapture his former Wolverine-ness, Logan replies with a brooding “It’s not who I am anymore.” (Yes, that line is actually said in a movie in 2013.) Despite the creative shortcomings apparent from the very outset, the early stages are far and away the most satisfying parts of The Wolverine. I can read books and add, so I don’t really follow X-Men lore, but the opening sequences give the impression that we’re smack dab in the middle of something epic. You’ll figure out why it worked retroactively, after you see the rest of the movie: there’s minimal dialogue, while most of the middle/later scenes are just talk-talk-talk (plenty more to come on this… stay tuned). Early on, there really isn’t much happening; just Logan hanging out in the Canadian wilderness, chilling with bears, and getting into the occasional bar fight. Still, Jackman provides a powerful screen presence, so his mug alone is enough to keep you interested, and when he does talk, his astute thespianism shines through.

Of course, Logan gets called back into service, and treks to Japan to meet the man he saved back at Nagasaki, who is now conveniently the insanely rich CEO of some sort of high tech firm, the product line of which is never really explained. From the moment these two men meet face to face, for the rest of the film, The Wolverine descends into one of the worst attempts at dramatic dialogue you will ever witness. I’m sure the characters were saying some wonderfully elucidating superhero-ey things, but that doesn’t matter. The mode of delivery was something I’m not sure if I had ever seen before. Every exchange has this exact format, never wavering: [Character One sentence]… 2.5 second pause… [Character Two sentence]… 2.5 second pause… [Character One sentence]… 2.5 second pause… Presumably a third of the runtime is made up of these pregnant pauses set in verbal exchanges that would be quick and snappy in any real world situation (or good movie). Plus, add in the fact that there is a ton of dialogue outright, and the thing quickly becomes unbearable. I’m having great difficulty finding out who directed this film because my Wikipedia language settings are currently stuck on Portuguese, but whoever it is needs a swift kick in the arse.

The unbreakably monotonous pace of the dialogue can have no other effect than to put you to sleep. This is no joke; they found some sort of magical verbal delivery rate that is the cinematic equivalent of tryptophan. If you do manage to convince the guys at the snack stand to whip up some Folgers for you, I guess you could remain lucid, but you’ll quickly find yourself screaming “talk!” at the screen as the characters motionlessly stare at each other’s’ slightly ajar yet soundless mouths. If the characters were saying something interesting, or talking about some critical plot point, you wouldn’t be able to follow along anyway, simply because whatever they said three lines ago, you heard it about four minutes prior. The sum of this criticism is thus: The Wolverine is in very strong contention for being the most boring movie of all time.

The plot will do little to ease your inevitable indifference. The aforementioned Japanese CEO is in his last throes of life, and offers to take Logan’s immortality and transplant it unto himself. Death is something Logan has long yearned for, so he hints that he’ll go along with it. It’s sort of an interesting setup, however it’s rendered irrelevant when the CEO dies almost immediately. So what about the rest of the movie; theoretically, wouldn’t Logan just head back to Canada and coach pee-wee hockey? That’s no recipe for a blockbuster (unless it stars Emilio Estevez). Instead, Logan decides to hang around to protect the life of the CEO’s granddaughter, who is now poised, via inheritance, to become the biggest socioeconomic force in Japan. Here’s where the logic sort of breaks down though. The CEO is the one who owed Logan, for the whole A-bomb annihilation prevention thingy. So why does Logan care about the protecting the granddaughter? It could be that he’s just a really nice guy, which is fine, but not very compelling from a movie standpoint.

So the bulk of the movie is therefore Logan and the granddaughter on the run from various Asiatic peoples. There are multiple parties gunning for her, and it wasn’t exactly clear to this chap who is who and who’s after what. It makes it very difficult to get invested in the welfare of the granddaughter when you can’t figure out what the negative consequences would be if she was captured or killed. This is the case even when the film concludes, and all the cards have presumably been laid out on the table. Why should we have cared about what just happened for the prior two hours?

It’s the definition of a forgettable movie experience. The most significant scene is the one that rolls after the first batch of closing credits. (This is a practice that should be banned by theaters, because even if you want to stick around and see the credits, you may be obliged to move for people seated in the middle of the row who want to get the hell out of there.) I can’t even remember who died and who’s still chuggin’ along, so I couldn’t spoil it for you even if I wanted to. No worries though; this movie was spoiled long before America’s favorite film critic laid eyes upon it.