It kicks off like a Victorian period piece. The year is 1854 and a sick young boy gets out of bed to kill a drunken man who has just murdered his father. The boy has sharp bony claws which protrude from his knuckles at will. Is this a horror movie? Will Christopher Lee suddenly appear, glinting menacingly on the horizon?

No. The film turns out to be an invented prequel to Marvel Comics’ X-Men, and Logan, the boy, is a mutant who can apparently recover from any injury, even the fever which has him bedridden. His brother also has very long fingernails and, after the murder, the pair flee from the police and become Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber).

These two finger-licking superhumans join the army and fight in the American Civil War, the two world wars and Vietnam, saving each others’ lives and generally inflicting mayhem on the enemy. But there doesn’t seem to be much love lost between them and it all comes to a head when they’re recruited by nasty Danny Huston (surely a casting contradiction in terms for this amiable actor) to form part of a black ops squad.

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When the squad does some vicious things to Nigerian villagers on the way to beating up a drug lord, Wolverine is disgusted. Sabretooth, meanwhile, goes rogue and decides to kill everyone in sight, including his brother if he can. Which, of course, we know he can’t since we’ve already seen the X-Men follow-up films.

Gavin Hood, the South African director of the excellent Tsotsi, handles all this war stuff with a lot of quickfire editing and then gets down to the real point: an endless stream of fights and special effects finishing up on Three Mile Island, which we discover isn’t a nuclear plant at all but a top-secret government facility for storing captured mutants and converting them to the villain’s side.

You just wonder why Hood waited so long before getting on to the business of amazing our eyes and ears with some ripping entertainment — we could have done without the Victorian episode and the romp through the wars.

Besides the redundant early story, the screenplay is only just adequate and, frankly, neither Wolverine nor Sabretooth are given much in the way of character to bite on. This is a pity for Jackman in particular, an actor who, at his best, is far above this sort of summer season farrago. He has to battle a marauding helicopter and two armoured vehicles as well as jumping about like a handsome but slightly demented battering ram who is seeking revenge on practically the whole world — principally because his girlfriend (Lynn Collins) has come to a sticky end.

You don’t really believe in any of the characters, who also include Agent Zero (Daniel Henney), Weapon X1 (Scott Atkins) and The Blob (an enormously portly Kevin Durand). Perhaps the suspension of disbelief is what such films require and even bargain for. So if you like this sort of thing it is mercifully under two hours long and fast-paced enough to make you forget the credit crunch for a bit.

For the rest of us, it’s sound and fury signifying virtually nothing, expensively mounted, crashingly noisy but hardly a big-budget must-see. The new Star Trek, coming out here next week, would seem to have an easy ride beside it.