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XXX-Men: The Jackman Cometh

Canada, the early 1800s: a healthy baby boy is born with ten fingers, ten toes, and six claws.  Though sickly for most of his childhood, young James Logan soon recovers his strength and discovers his mutant healing ability, just in time to run off with vicious, older half-brother, Victor Creed.  The brothers fight in every major war the world has seen in the last hundred years, eventually parting ways when the carnage gets to be too much for sensitive Jimmy, whilst Victor can’t sate his bloodlust at all.  Do I sense a brother against brother throwdown in the near future?  Oh, I think so.  And not one — but three!

Viewers of the recent X-Men trilogy (2000, 2003, 2006) know that the man named Logan suffers amnesia, and that his memory loss and indestructible adamantium skeleton have their origins somewhere in a past entanglement with William Stryker, a military man with a pathological bent against mutants.  Wolverine (Logan’s code name, because every superpowered person apparently requires a code name) chooses not to pursue uncovering his origins in X2, a definitive signal that beyond the answers already provided, whatever happened in the past doesn’t really matter.  It neither affects his character, nor impacts his utility to the audience.  Let’s not even pretend that he’s any more than an avatar for the audience’s vicarious barbarity.  He’s a sensitive soul with an animalistic tempter.  He can’t be killed, and he’s got big, gleaming, retractable claws that can slice through pretty much any substance in the known world.

Evidently suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage that crippled the logic centers of their brains (perhaps the result of a rogue telepath taking the piss out?), the suits who went ahead with X-Men 3: The Last Stand without Bryan Singer have decided that fans of the series are just dying to know what really happened to pre-X-Men Wolvie, even though none of these past events really impacted the storytelling of the original three films.  So we get an origin story, unimaginatively titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine (because summer movie viewers are believed to be as mentally retarded as the producers who cooked up this prequel).  What we have, then, is a movie that put me in mind of Highlander, a saga about an immortal northerner who lives by his blade(s), and spends centuries avoiding female companionship because his One True Love was taken from him by a sadistic madman.  Like Connor MacLeod, it is suggested that Wolverine can be killed by decapitation, though the one similarly immortal character in the film who is decapitated apparently survives in a post-credit tag that only screened in half the theaters.  Wolverine therefore suffers from Superman Syndrome: due to his invulnerability, it is impossible to fret for his safety.

Therefore, Wolverine is boring.

Without any question over his ability to surmount the challenges facing him — and the film is basically one dustup after another, much like a video game with seemingly endless expository cutscenes — it turns out that Logan only has two modes: wrathful and pensively regretful.  These are the only two emotional states he seems to possess, and since he never gets any emotional closure about anything even before Stryker puts two adamantium bullets in his brain, thus erasing his memory and setting up his role in the original three films.  This bit of retcon is the only useful thing about the film.  Adamantium is apparently the only thing that can penetrate adamantium.  Establishing that a hole existed in Wolvie’s otherwise-bulletproof skull explains how a policeman could shoot him in X2, when the bullet should have just bounced off.

With no story value, ostensibly the only reason this film exists at all is to satisfy the craving of the average comic book nerd to see Wolverine in some feverishly-pitched battles with his half-brother, Sabretooth (nee Vic Creed), and a few other recognizable fan-favorites from the X-universe.  A couple singular moments aside — a super-samurai slicing a bullet in half, a gambler raising a deck of kinetically-charged playing cards in a coronal arc before hurling them at Logan — the action is nothing if not routine filler.  For the amount of violence in this film, none of it contains moments of invention or emotional charge equivalent to the savagery on display.

Hugh Jackman once more glues on his prosthetic claws (to be CG-assisted in post-production) to play Logan, and the most revelatory thing about his performance is that a guy so amazingly good looking and invested in a part can be so dull.  Sneers, grunts, high-flying stunts (again, CG-assisted in post), and impressively coiffed hair/mutton chops aside, there is nothing underlying Jackman’s performance but a seething impatience to get to the bank and see how many pretty little zeroes have been added to his account.  With nothing in the script but hand-wringing over his aptitude for berserker rage — which, by the way, we barely glimpse — to develop his character, Jackman is forced into paint-by-numbers acting, mostly reacting with theatrical conviction to the fantastic atrocities committed by the evildoers hounding him. 

That’s why Liev Schreiber makes such an impression.  He also has a one-note role, but it’s a role he hasn’t already played three times.  Sabretooth revels in his badness, yet nurses a wounded emotional center that his younger brother would spurn their relationship in favor of, you know, common human decency.  Despite some truly godawful sequences of Schreiber running on all fours, he’s the only performer whose conviction elevates the film.  After all, Victor Creed regards all around him with wry bemusement, and what better stance to take against a film so aggressively pointless?

Had the filmmakers any cinematic literacy, they would have leveraged Wolverine’s saga into an homage to a samurai’s pilgrimage or the code of the long-lost western hero.  Instead, it’s a merely-competent collage of perfunctory skirmishes, wasted supporting actors, and artless plot-plodding that succeeds in finally killing the uncanny, unkillable Logan.  I hope to hell he stays dead.  

Or at least gets his ass kicked by Christopher Lambert.

Edited by Dan Swensen.