As trite, overplayed and downright basic this is to admit, Wolverine is and always will be one of my favorite super heroes.
Since I was young, be it comics, the fabled 90s cartoon, the criminally underrated 00s reboot of said cartoon, slightly off brand mass market paperbacks and the birth of the X-Men film franchise, Wolverine always stood out to me not simply due to the his unmistakable aesthetic, but for his contradictory personality and strong ethical code.
Plus he was Canadian, occasionally swore and cut people up with his claws, which pre-teen Josh definitely enjoyed.
So, when I heard that Fox would be following up the subpar (to be extremely diplomatic) XX-Men: The Last Stand with a series of origin films focused on individual characters, starting with Wolverine, I was intrigued. When I found out that the movie would be adapting elements of the fantastic “Wolverine: Origin” mini-series, Barry Windsor Smith’s classic Weapon X storyline and elements of his past with Team X, that intrigue turned into interest. Finally, when the long rumored casting of Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson became a reality, that interest became full blown excitement.
I really, truly should have known better.
This movie committed many sins, many (but not all) of which would be karmically rectified by future entries in the ever expanding world of super hero cinema (notably 2017’s Logan and 2016’s Deadpool), but it’s biggest sin to my mind was its complete and utter waste of the potential it was given.
Starting with Hugh Jackman’s eponymous protagonist, the film turned in a portrayal of Wolverine that was as two dimensional as the pages the character on which the character was printed for decades. Motivated and manipulated by a thin and poorly justified love story and a contrived and convenient family loyalty narrative, the character who should have been able to see through everyone’s bullshit continually fell victim to it. What we’re left with is a version of the character who we not only do not want to root for, but leaves us continually facepalming at his poor decisions and misguided motivations. Not to mention that they completely misunderstood what made the stories it was adapting work so well, pulling the most mediocre and baseline interpretations from them to the point that not only was the source of Wolverine’s memory loss (a central component of every version of his character) not comics-accurate, it didn’t even make sense.
Speaking of mediocre and baseline interpretations, this film was given some of the most popular and uniformly important characters in the X-Men universe and turned them into unlikable archetypes or, worse, cannon fodder. Turning the Blob, one of the most ever-present and powerful villains to ever go toe to toe with the X-Men, into a walking definition of fat shaming was insulting. Turning Gambit, one of the most beloved X-Men in the history of the franchise, into a watered down grifter without even a hint of cajun charm was inexcusable. But completely unforgivable is what was done to Deadpool. Taking the beloved jokester and mangling him into a Power Rangers antagonist-level martial artist with the attitude of a petulant teenager and then literally sewing shut the mouth of a character known for decades as “the merc with a mouth.” All of this proves that the creators of this travesty had no interest in honoring the characters with which they’d been entrusted but were more than happy to profit off their inclusion and the subsequent marketing opportunities that came with that.
The hits don’t stop there, as not only were the characters mishandled, so too was the talent hired to portray them. Not only was Hugh Jackman’s natural charisma and likability buried in his character’s poor life decisions, they also turned perennial talent Liev Schreiber into a motivationless, one-dimensional moustache twirler and Dominic Monaghan into a redshirt after unceremoniously shifting his character from Beak (a compelling, physically deformed mutant with a heart of gold) to Bolt (a throwaway character I needed to look up and I bet you did too). The fact that Will.i.am had one of the most relatable and balanced portrayals of long-standing Wolverine ally John Wraith says everything you need to know about how mismanaged this cast was given the collective talent it contained.
Continued belowContrived storytelling, disrespect to the source material, mishandling of characters and cast members combined with some of the worst CGI this side of Sharknado make this tire fire of a movie a permanent blot on the X-Men franchise from which it has barely recovered ten years later.
It does have one thing going for it though: it helped launch Multiversity and gave me a few years of great times with great friends working together to show mutual love and support to a medium that has given us so much.
So, at least there’s that!
