Lower Decks

Okay, so I’m not exactly a Marvel sort of guy. As with comics, so too with the films, I end up with more enthusiasm for DC projects. Last year was an easy pick for me when others found it difficult to choose between ‘Iron Man’ and ‘The Dark Knight’ as the best superhero flick of 2008. While I enjoyed the X-Men series, I was never quite as swept up in the Spider-Mans. I still consider ‘Daredevil’ (the original or director’s cut) to be the epitome of that clan. It’s not that Marvel screws up quite so badly on the screen as it seems to on the page (hey, my opinions, okay). Casting is usually an undeniable highlight. It’s the stories that invariably let these movies down. ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ is really no different.

As you’ll recall, back in the winter of 2007, there was a strike among Hollywood writers that crippled that TV season and cast a pall on a block of some future cinematic release slate. ‘Star Trek’ (2009) wasn’t delayed by these events, but it was affected to a certain extent, and that’s one of the few cases where I heard anything at all about a film being affected. No one’s said it (so I’ve heard, anyway), but I’ve got to suspect that ‘Wolverine’ was another victim. There’s an interesting movie in there somewhere, but it’s so obscured that you’d hardly notice. Instead, we end up with a mash-up that skims around some of the basic backstory material that’s developed around comics’ most famous mutant over the years.

Okay, so there’s a bit of a problem there already. Unlike a Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man, Wolverine’s origins were never crystal clear. You’d have to slog through years of continuity shifts and creators to even begin piecing it together. Some of it is quite famous, classic. The Weapon X program elements are well-known, even that he seems to have lived quite a longer life than he’s been able to remember, names he’s gone by wars he fought in, an arch-foe or two that have become integral to his private battles. But he doesn’t have that single telling, much less that Joker, Lex Luthor, or Green Goblin for which he can invariably pivoted around. In fact, this film becomes as much a defining source of that story as there has ever been.

Trouble is, the pieces are still left dangling. We begin with a sickly James (not given the surname of Howlett in the movie, though fans would know it anyway) being raised in the same house as Victor Creed, later known as Sabretooth, in nineteenth century Canada, who exhibits a barely useful healing factor even then. But his own father is at the mercy of Creed’s, an apparent belligerent drunk who murders him one evening. James stumbles down for vengeance, Creed’s dad says it’s not what it seems, sober as a whistle, but the boy pops bone claws and kills him, only to learn that he’s just killed his real father. James runs off, Creed right after him, with a new pact as brothers to unite them. Then we just sort of leapfrog through a sequence of famous wars they fight and heal-factor their ways through, never to hear another word of whatever their dad might have wanted to say about what the true circumstances were, until William Stryker recruits them during the Vietnam War to join a mercenary team of mutants.

Now, I love Ryan Reynolds, I really do (‘Smokin’ Aces’ is a great film no one is quite ready to acknowledge), but he is not really the Merc with a Mouth his Wade Wilson, later-to-become-Deadpool, is supposed to be; despite everyone saying how obnoxious he is, he ends up being a perfect example of where the movie turns south, an inability to capture any real authenticity (which is a basic Marvel failing, really, an almost pathological clinging to “the comic book, youth-based appeal”). Except in High Jackman (and Liev Schreiber). Jackman is never the problem. It’s the material that lets him down. When his love interest is dropped in the middle of the story, it’s either to say she’s ultimately not really so important, or as it turns out, there’s superficially more than meets the eye about her. Waste of character development. We end up feeling more genuine human concern for him when he meets the kind of good old farmers baby Kal-El rocketed toward, who feel like some classical element of his story no one ever knew about.

(Some of the story feels like it’s got more influence from Richard Donner than can in all right be chalked up to him, brought in as he was into production to help smooth things for director Gavin Hood. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what Donner could have done if he’d had the project himself from the start.)

Well, like I said, I was a fan of the X-Men movies, all three of them (I hold no illogical vendetta against Brett Ratner, as so many seem to, and besides, after two Bryan Singer entries, if someone else couldn’t work the same material with the same cast, then Singer should by all rights have been deemed a failure, not a success, with his), but I never quite held them in the regard that others did. They were clever, but they weren’t groundbreaking. They made Marvel fans go see, in droves, big budget versions of characters they had long been enthralled with. It was never as hard as it seems to have seemed. All these fans had to wait for was the technology to catch up with all the effects-heavy mythology Marvel always required. The real success, the real find, was always Wolverine, Hugh Jackman. Ian McKellen, yes, as Magneto (it amazed me that the comics, which under Grant Morrison assumed the aesthetic of the X-Men costumes at least, never quite took up the cerebral approach McKellen mastered of this grand villain, except in the inconsequential Ultimate version), which makes it both ironic and appropriate that Magneto is the subject of the next spin-off, but likely without McKellen.

It’s hard to say that any other Marvel character has struck a cord in the modern age with audiences, whether as readers or viewers, as Wolverine. There’re certainly supposed to be more famous ones but none other than can be turned to quite so ubiquitously as cigar-chomping Logan. His indestructibility has advanced to a point where in this film, it’s taken visually for granted. Even his claws take on an assumed air. They’re just supposed to be there. So the film can get away with throwing a fair portion of his own film at a bunch of other mutants, as if, once again, he really is co-starring in just another X-Men film; even the future Cyclops gets thrown in for no other reason than, well, the visuals. The film, his own film, takes him for granted at this point. It seems to say, he’s too famous to bother with covering all the material himself.

That’s not really the problem so much as most of it amounting to nothing but a distraction. The war between brothers ends up with a quick reconciliation, even though in the chronologically later X-Men films we know there will still be no resolution (as I suspect there has yet to be in the comics, at least to any famous degree). I love seeing Dominic Monaghan from ‘Lost’ again, but Kevin Durand from a season later (and another death on that show) turns into an unnecessary joke, with the only real outcome being Logan using the term “Bub” for the first time, and even that’s wasted. We learn how he gets that cool leather jacket, too, but not how he remembers how to retrieve it after, well, finally losing his memory. Loose ends that never really get tied up, the story of this story.

It’s not the action that I object to. There’s no point in that, because Wolverine would not really be at home in a story without a significant amount of action (as even the recent “Old Man Logan” story arc in the comics can attest). It’s how there’s no cohesion. There’s so much mess to the story that in losing so much focus from Wolverine himself, the movie forgets that it had an incredible opportunity here to really tell a definitive story for an iconic character. Instead, it fritters away, less a ‘Batman Begins’ than what ‘Elektra’ was supposed to have been, basically a huge, inconsequential mess.

For fans of Jackman, this would not be a waste of your time. He glows. Schreiber glows. Danny Huston as this version of Stryker glows. Wolverine himself glows. But there’s so little real substance here that this film could ultimately become the Wolverine equivalent of Ang Lee’s ‘The Hulk.’ Or even ‘The Incredible Hulk,’ because I haven’t really heard anyone speak all the more glowingly of that version, either. Someone could come along and try this again, hopefully with Jackman or someone of equal fiery passion in the title role, but this isn’t what it was supposed to be.

Close, but you know, no cigar.