Hugh Jackman in X-Men Origins: Wolverine
The Most Famous Comic Book Hero of All Time Gets his Own Film
May 13, 2009
There’s a scene in X-Men Origins: Wolverine where the mutant Sabertooth approaches a woman in a car, his claws tearing the hood to shreds, and what does she do? Just sits there and stares. Now, if a mutant came and starting laying waste to the hood of a real person's car, chances are they'd be kicking the gas pedal darn near through the floor.
Roger Ebert's Idiot Plot
There’s a lot of that in Wolverine; where people stand around and react to spectacular things as if they are nothing. This is a micro version of what Roger Ebert calls the Idiot Plot in which people avoid all common sense in order for the plot to keep functioning, which, needless to say, a lot of films these days wouldn’t exist without.
There was never any of this present in any of the three previous X-Men films, but there’s a lot of it in Wolverine, the least of the series, maybe because it has the least X-Men?
These films, although never great, used to function on intelligence and ideas. Separating Wolverine from the rest of the pack is proven here to be, more or less, separating the ideas from the spectacles.
Mutants at War
The film starts with an opening montage, calling to mind the opening of the much better Watchmen, in which Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and his brother Sabertooth (Liev Schreiber) fight through the wars of American history.
The logic of such a montage is flawed in that these men are hundreds of years old and apparently cannot be killed unless through decapitation. If mutants are immortal and possess the power to move the Golden Gate Bridge with their mind, as seen in the third X-Men film, then couldn’t they at least have won Vietnam?
The Origins of Wolverine
Anyway, Wolverine, who is seen in a prologue as a child but apparently stops aging right around when he starts looking like Hugh Jackman, begins to grow a conscience; he doesn’t want to use his powers for killing anymore, while Sabertooth is slowly consumed by his inner beast.
The two are separated when Wolverine quits the mutant black-ops team headed by William Stryker who is played by Danny Huston, the only actor who could possibly play a slimier villain than his ol’ man John Houston.
Skip to the present where Stryker enlists Sabertooth to kill off mutants, including those from the old team, or capture them and take them to an isolated island where experiments will be performed to create the ultimate mutant.
Under circumstances not much worth explaining, the byproduct of one of these experiments is Wolverine having an impenetrable substance collected from an asteroid known as Adamantium, injected into his body, replacing his bones entirely. In the sequel, Wolverine should hook up with Susan from Monsters vs. Aliens and share asteroid extract stories.
So, X-Men Origins: Wolverine enlightens as to how Logan got Wolverine’s metal claws, which started out as bones that looked like bent old tree roots, but what it doesn’t even begin to contemplate is how Logan reacted to his powers, how he came to terms with them and learned how to negotiate them, nor anything about how society regarded mutants before the dawn of the X-Men, the very stuff that has ensured the continued relevance of the comic books in the first place; the very basics of character storytelling.
The Comic Book Film as Spectacle
No, the film doesn’t have time for that. At a taut hour and forty-eight minutes, it is wall-to-wall special effects from beginning to end with high speed motorcycle chases, exploding helicopters and intense video game-like duels atop crumbling smokestacks.
What promises to be an engaging origin story of the X-Men’s most intriguing character is no more than a sophomoric “Where’s that Airship” Movie. Even the debut of the most sorely missed original X-Man Gambit seems anti-climactic as he serves nothing more than to be another face amidst the spectacle.
All of this is at least done with style and Jackman, Schreiber and Huston are perfect for their roles, but in the days of The Dark Knight, Ironman or even the previous X-Men films; films about psychological character dramas and intriguing social critiques, Wolverine is the victim of its own standards: there’s nothing uniquely Wolverine about it.
Any action hero could have been stuck into this plot basically unchanged and the film’s outcome would have the same. For an origin story, Wolverine has no more depth than, say, a video game based on the same thing.
It’s shocking then to learn that Wolverine was directed by Gavin Hood who, like Marc Forster with Quantum of Solace, is a natural born storyteller.
His first film Tsotsi won the best foreign film Academy Award in 2005 and his second film was the angry, underrated political thriller Rendition. And, like Forster, he has turned in the worst film of the series.
Let’s hope that this project was a way to fund a better one and not a premonition of another great talent being devoured by Hollywood.
Rating: 2 out of 5
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