This is an incredibly nerdy thing to say, but the movies have never been able to get the character of Wolverine right. Long considered a contender for Marvel’s most popular character, he’s been spread thin by a cinematic franchise that has taken the lawless marauder from the comics and gradually turned him into an alpha male hero with occasional den mother sensibilities. That comes not from star Hugh Jackman, but from the stardom itself, the kind that can make a 5”3 feral madman into a footnote for a devastatingly handsome leading actor.
Jackman’s done his best to bring dimension to the character; his explanation about the pain of releasing and retracting the adamantium claws from his knuckles in the first film brings a backstory to the character to which the script doesn’t even allude. His Logan is equal parts Man With No Name and caged animal, and before comic book films found simplicity in determining the villains from the Avengers, there was the sense that this muscled outlaw could be either friend or foe. His relationship with Anna Paquin’s Rogue in X-Men is tender but not overdone, fulfilled by both necessity and honor. It’s his healing power that saves her in two separate moments of near-death. Rogue’s comic flirtation with Gambit fueled fan approval, but this was a richer, more complex relationship. Rogue, not ready to be sexual, allowing the hirsute older man to penetrate her in a science fiction PG-13 venue.
Jackman’s Wolverine is a skeptic and an outsider in the first X-Men, and the decision to sex him up stems not only from commercial reasons, but also storytelling ones: He’s our eyes and ears for the audience to enter the film. Smart for the first film, yes, but it’s this decision that has hamstrung the rest of the series, as the audience nonetheless waits for Wolverine’s say.
He gets the show-stopping battle on top of the Statue of Liberty at the film’s end, while also saving the girl and stopping an apocalypse, and by the end of the first film, as good as they are, few people are talking about James Marsden’s Cyclops and his relationship with Famke Janssen’s model-pretty Jean Grey. Sure, the adults come away reflecting on the presence of Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart as Magneto and Professor X, both seasoned pros whom unquestionably elevate their material. But everyone else leaves the film wanting to be Wolverine.
Made a producer for the franchise, Jackman took center stage in X2: X-Men United, somewhat invalidating the end of X-Men, where he speeds away on a motorcycle determined to remain the lone wolf. His announcement that he found no traces of his origins in Alkali Lake (despite the massive structure underground found later that makes him look like an imbecile) is a shortcut to get him back to Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters, where he becomes the lone defender against a siege led by villain Col. Stryker (Brian Cox). Jackman’s hero is finally let loose, but it’s in a manner that sees him defending a collection of kids for the most part. When he is left at the home of Bobby Drake, the movie doesn’t ignore that he comes across as everyone’s hunky, rough-around-the-edges dad; asked what he “teaches” at the school, he deadpans, “Art.”
Col. Stryker is also given a past that involves the Weapon X program that created Wolverine, which inevitably ties the film’s ultimate threat to Logan’s history, further making the hero a building block of the franchise and not just another element. The hero’s origins had not yet been told in the comics, so the movies only had shreds of history to pursue, but it nonetheless acted as a way to illuminate a history we couldn’t possibly know. Cheekily, the most colorful acknowledgement of this mystery man’s past is when shape-shifter Mystique sneaks into his tent, sexually propositioning him by posing as a number of X-ladies, than Col. Stryker himself. Wolverine is not amused.
The third picture in this franchise managed to completely neuter Wolverine by taking X-Men field leader Cyclops out of the picture. With Professor X also killed (he got better), there was a void of leadership needed at Xavier’s School. Before his death, Professor X discusses this with long-running team member Storm (Halle Berry), but like all films directed by Brett Ratner, women don’t come off too well, relegated to the roles of sex objects, uncontrollably emotional messes, duplicitous traitors and objects of derision and cruelty. Jackman’s Wolverine actually says the wince-inducing words, “We’re X-Men,” as he leads the team into battle, eventually becoming the only one on the battlefield who can defeat Jean Grey’s untamed Phoenix. Most comic heroes have entertained endless parades of lovers, even when they are diminutive runts with retractable blades in their hands: in the movies, they have to be monogamous, so the famous Cyclops-Jean romance that made them the most important couple in mutant history gets turned into the unstoppable Wolverine-Jean union, with Cyclops killed early in the film and never once discussed.
But by the time he had been granted his own solo movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, he wasn’t even stabbing anyone, save for transparently invincible enemy Sabretooth, his supposed nastiness twisted into a Han Solo snarkiness. The contemporary Solo, where he shoots second. A famous Wolverine line has the character growling, “I’m the best there is at what I do. But what I do isn’t very nice.” Here, he says it in a domesticated situation, while happily driving his girlfriend around. The picture followed the comic Wolverine: Origins, a hastily-written account of the beginning of the Wolverine saga that took the most unimaginative approach possible in revealing the origins of comics’ most mysterious hero. Turns out, our hero was a sickly little boy in his youth, a dopily-ironic contrast to the bitter bruiser he would become. The especially-tantalizing mystery of why he and Sabretooth have been lifelong enemies is also solved: they were brothers. How original.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine went on to treat this story like gospel, adapting it to a film that feels like it was directed by a contest winner and not Academy Award winning Gavin Hood. Wolverine in the comics is someone who has done horrible things in the past, someone who has a history written in blood. This Wolverine blanches when his squad of d-listers is told to attack a small village searching for adamantium reservoirs, because he secretly is kind of a Nice Guy. Rendering the film something of a bad dream is the fact that Wolverine develops amnesia at the film’s close (thanks to young General Stryker literally shooting him in the memories), but the onscreen damage to the character was done. The most violent of all heroes was now a “hero,” a mistake made by marketing folks who assume that if a character is adapted from a comic book, he has to be heroic.
It took director James Mangold to finally figure out just exactly what makes this guy tick, and The Wolverine finally gives the character the film he deserves, for better or worse. Violent, melodramatic and strangely ponderous, it’s got everything longtime fans of the character wanted to see onscreen. Long forgotten are the hamstrung contortions to previous continuity; this picture occurs in the contemporary world, where no one dares speak about the events of X-Men Origins, not that anyone would want to. Though it does begin in the past, a reverent recreation of Nagasaki during World War II, where Logan (never referred to as James, thankfully) is some sort of P.O.W. When the bombs approach, a soldier hesitates to commit seppuku, and is rescued by the merciful mutant.
Ages later, the Wolverine wanders the wilderness, haunted by the events of X-Men: The Last Stand. The woman he murdered, Jean Grey, still visits him in dreams, her face a reminder of his past failures. Herein lies the most common of traits, the man who believes he’s got a toxic touch. He can’t help himself when he finds a poisoned bear, tracking its killers to deliver nature’s vengeance. This attracts the attention of Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a Japanese girl seeking the services of the Wolverine. She dresses like a restless teenager and displays immaculate martial arts skill: it seems like a joke on the pint-sized girl enforcer trope when Logan opens her car door only to send junk food spilling out on the sidewalk. It’s a good one.
Yukio offers Logan the opportunity to visit Japan and meet Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi), the man he saved in the film’s prologue, who has become a leader of industry in his homeland. Now on his deathbed, it appears he wants to thank his savior, but instead he has an offer, one that proves quite Faustian: relinquish your mutant healing ability and slow aging process, and live a happy life as a retired hero. After some lighthearted, necessary moments of levity found in East-meets-West culture clashes (surprisingly respectful, for the most part), Logan makes his choice, walking out on a promise of humanity, and perhaps finding something suspicious about an elderly billionaire hoping to get a taste of sweet mutant blood “as a favor.” Then again, can you blame the guy with a metal skeleton for not wanting to participate in any further shady surgeries?
Yashida’s sudden death afterwards sets the plot in motion, placing Logan in the middle of a spiderweb. A series of double-crosses occurs, leaving Wolverine in the middle of a massive war between the Yashida family and the Yakuza, and before you can say “stranger in a strange land,” he finds himself attracted to family granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto). Through a hail of gunfire and fisticuffs, he becomes her bodyguard as she becomes a target, a scenario that honestly plays like an issue of Hugh Jackman Fan Club Fantasies© than a believable romance. Jackman and Okamoto don’t have any real chemistry, but it’s hard to imagine a character loving Logan quite like the camera adores Jackman. Oiled up and muscled, Jackman assumes the type of poses and postures in this film normally seen on the cover of Harlequin romance novels. Even when he wears a shirt (not often), he’s straight GQ. Anyone longing for the physical representation for the comics, sorry; wait for the reboot.
Despite the politically-knotty plot (which remains pulpy enough to allow for the third act inclusion of an elusive ninja clan), the focus seems geared towards Logan’s character arc. At the start of the film, he’s a man who wants to die; he doesn’t seek combat because he loves the first anymore, but because he’s secretly hoping this will be his last time standing. His rescue of young Yashida occurs at an earlier point, where he can spare the life of an enemy soldier because of common decency, but the Wolverine we meet today would probably let the man burn. It’s a pretty basic something-to-live-for story, but in this situation, it’s dealing with someone who just might be immortal. After more than a hundred years alive, how do you avoid just becoming an instrument of death? It’s counter-productive to say that we want Wolverine to find humanity, but we don’t want him to stop stabbing people. You don’t go to The Wolverine expecting the lead character to not be the Wolverine (he tries in vain to shed the nickname here). At the same time, you want to see a character grow, you want him to change, and there’s the sense that Mangold finds a happy medium in this film, though anyone who wishes Logan would unsheathe his claws and go full Kerouac should dial down those expectations a bit.
The film tries valiantly to attempt what every superhero film recently has failed to do: make the invincible hero sweat. Through a convoluted set of circumstances, Logan loses his regenerative healing ability, but the film’s version of illustrating his newfound mortality is by him taking ten or fifteen bullets and admitting that it’s starting to hurt. The action doesn’t reach the levels of absurdity as the last film, and that’s a good thing, restricting the combat to close-quarters clashes in a number of inspired settings. This is the best brawling the franchise has seen yet, and the hero doles out a number of memorable maulings. One bit on top of a bullet train gamely tries to top a similar sequence in Spider-Man 2 and while it doesn’t completely succeed, it matches that moment in proudly ridiculous physics.
A final clash seems like an overlong hassle, involving an Iron Man-like giant robot, but at least it features the gamine, reptilian Viper as a memorable threat. She sheds her skin with ease and disables opponents with a poisonous tongue, which is more than can be said of actress Svetlana Khodchenkova. She moves like ‘80s era Bridgette Nielsen, but speaks like a bored middle-aged housewife. Her character is actually meant to be part of the larger Marvel universe: Viper has her abilities due to an association with the organization HYDRA, who were a less-fantastical presence in Captain America: The First Avenger. The snake-like abilities she sports are eye-catching and gruesome, but it often feels like she wandered in from another film, or, in this case, continuity.
The problem with most of these ongoing franchises is the need to repeatedly blow up the world. The Wolverine manages to resemble more of a throwback, when a hero could travel to a faraway land and get involved with some sort of intrigue, then go back home to get ready for the next adventure. Shades of James Bond, whom Fox would love to honor with their series, particularly because Wolverine is such a world traveler in the comics, and because the X-Men series itself is such an unwieldy beast of alternate timelines and characters. The stakes are high for the character (and there’s at least one major, attention-getting change to our hero in the final reel), but there’s never the sense that the outside world is in trouble, that the balance of power is about to shift. It’s all in keeping with the idea of the hero as a lone wolf. The X-Men (and the accompanying franchise) need him more than he needs them, and the film’s strength lies in moments when you realize help from an outside source would probably weigh him down.
The Wolverine sets the stage for further adventures of Logan, even tying the end of this film to the beginning of next summer’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past. That picture is a return to the old world-ending nature of these franchises, with multiple realities hanging in the balance: true to form, Fox is refusing to gamble on an X-Men film without Jackman, who will again be the center of this film. Jackman’s so indispensible that they couldn’t even ditch him for prequel X-Men: First Class, where his one-line cameo was a highlight for the least popular film in the series domestically. Credit Jackman’s skill and versatility in the role, as Days Of Future Past promises to make literal what we already know: this character is the glue that holds this universe together, and the reason audiences keep coming back. Thanks to The Wolverine, we finally understand why.