Sibling rivalry and revenge

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (***) - Starring Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber. Directed by Gavin Hood. M. Defiance (****) - Starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber. Directed by Edward Zwick. M.

Coincidentally, these two new films screening in Nelson have striking similarities despite being about as opposite as they could be in the type of movies they are.

Defiance, based on a true story, is a war survival drama, depicting the heroic, desperate struggle of a large group of Jews to avoid being killed by the Nazis; Wolverine is a comicbook fantasy concoction about how the title character came to be one of a group of people with individual special powers.

Both movies concern sibling rivalry and revenge, both are about retaining humanity in testing circumstances, and both co-star Liev Schreiber.

Who? Schreiber's face will be more familiar than his name. He's a successful stage actor who's been in many B-movies and, more recently, has had key roles in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, The Painted Veil and Love in the Time of Cholera. His partner is Australian actress Naomi Watts, with whom he has two sons.

In Wolverine, he plays ferocious Victor Creed (aka Sabretooth, although he's not called that in the film), the evil brother of James Logan (a fiercely determined Hugh Jackman), who becomes Wolverine. Victor has long, powerful fingernails. He revels in killing - which leads him into conflict with a vengeful Wolverine.

In Defiance, Schreiber plays hot-headed Zus Bielski, one of three Jewish brothers whose parents and loved ones are killed during the German invasion of Belorussia (Belarus) in 1941. Zus angrily wants revenge, and is willing to join Russian partisans to do so, while his brother Tuvia (a fiercely determined Daniel Craig) wants to help fleeing Jews survive by hiding in a forest.

Tuvia says their revenge "is to live", and that they "may be hunted like animals but will not become animals" - and that if they die trying to live, at least they will die like human beings.

Wolverine refuses to embrace his dark side - "the animal" - although at one point he exclaims, "You wanted the animal, colonel? You got him!".

Tuvia's resolve in Defiance will be challenged by collaborators, a harsh winter with food and medicine scarce to alleviate starvation and illness, internal friction and rebellion, and even pregnancy - while German soldiers and planes try to find and kill them.

Wolverine will have to confront other mutants with special powers, including a super-duper Frankenstein-type mutant into whom the powers of the others have been genetically pooled.

Similarly, both Wolverine and Tuvia Bielski have love interests - respectively, schoolteacher Kayla (Lynn Collins), who inspires his nickname, and forest refugee Lilka (Alexa Davalos).

Genre-wise, Defiance is the better movie. Director Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Glory) does a workmanlike, if earnest, job of telling his story, although he's more comfortable in conflict scenes than in portraying camp life in the woods, where an attempt is made to show different kinds of Jews caught up in such a fearful situation - the fighters and the intellectuals, with Tuvia, both compassionate and pragmatic, trying to unite all in one community.

Wolverine provides plenty of action, delivered by director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, Rendition), who seems to relish the anything-goes framework of comicbook action. But it often looks like a video game and seldom achieves memorable moments, either in terms of special effects or story, suffering perhaps in the wake of last year's The Dark Knight and Iron Man.

It's a movie that does little to distinguish itself in inventive novelty from many other comicbook action movies (and TV's Heroes). The story lurches from one action set piece to another. The set-up never explains how Wolverine got his retractable blades or why his brother turns, Watchmen-style, on his mutant comrades. An early montage shows Logan and Creed fighting (as mercenaries, one presumes, since they're Canadian) in the American Civil War, and for the Yanks in both world wars and the Vietnam War, and in such an indestructible way you wonder how they lost the latter.

And in case you're wondering, the movie's spectacular backgrounds, from fiords to mountains to river valleys, were shot in New Zealand.

It will be interesting to see which, if any, of the other X-Men heroes gets this new Origins focus, or if Wolverine, the most popular of the X-Men, will earn a sequel on the basis of this movie.

If so, it should retain Schreiber, as it's his presence that provides some edge to the story. Schrieber is also in Defiance's best scenes, be they sparring with anti-Semitic Russians or clashing with his brother. He is the solid cornerstone in both movies.

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