X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE – gavin hood – 2.4 / 10

Overstuffed with plot while simultaneously failing to explain some key elements of the character’s mythology, X-Men Origins: Wolverine never really figures out exactly what story it’s telling and because of that turns out to be mostly a muddled mess of a film. So much happens over the course of the film’s two-hour run time that it’s really somewhat amazing how little of it is memorable or interesting. Perhaps even more surprising is that amidst all the vehicular action sequences, hand-to-hand battles, gunfights and explosions, the film never takes the time to explain why these people have superpowers and how exactly their powers work. Anyone who’s seen the X-Men films would, I assume, understand that the world of Wolverine is filled with mutants who each have unique abilities (teleportation, flight, laser beam eyes, etc.) and that Logan’s ability is that he can heal himself. But if you didn’t know that going in, I think it’d be pretty damn confusing as to why he’s been alive for over a hundred years and bullets seem not to have any effect on him.

But those concerns amount to little more than nitpicking when compared to the film’s main problem, namely that John ‘Wolverine’ Logan (Hugh Jackman, trying hard but ultimately forgettable) really has no purpose, no goal. There’s nothing the character really wants to achieve that justifies telling this story. He spends the first hour of the film wandering around from place to place with no real purpose (except maybe to be at peace, whatever that means). And for the second hour of the film, he just wants to kill Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber) who he believes murdered his paramour. Unfortunately, if you’ve seen any of the other X-Men films (which you sort of need to to understand this one), then you know that Victor survives the events of this film. Thus you know that Logan is going to be unsuccessful in achieving the only real goal he has, which sucks all the tension and narrative drive out of the film.

The problems with the film run even deeper than that, down to the very concept at the heart of its creation: i.e. the fact that this is a prequel that seeks to explain what happened in Logan’s past to turn him into the character we met in the X-Men films. But there’s a good reason why, when the character was first introduced, he was never given much of a backstory. This lack of a past was the most interesting thing about him. However good the idea of explaining that past might seem, allowing the viewers to fill in those gaps for themselves was always going to be more fulfilling. It’s the same problem that afflicts the Star Wars prequels. It might have sounded like a good idea to show how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, but not only are the prequels a complete artistic failure, the image of the bratty child Vader had once been carries over into the other films, forever tainting what had previously been a pretty terrifying villain by bringing him down to human level.

There’s really just no way to explain what happened to Logan that would be nearly as interesting as what the viewers could come up with on their own. On top of that, this film has the added burden of having to end with Logan in more or less the same place he begins the X-Men films, that is without any memory of who he is or how he became the killing machine he is. In other words, at the end of Wolverine, Logan has to lose. And it was going to take people with far more talent than the ones assembled for this project to make a big summer blockbuster that ends badly for its hero protagonist but still satisfies the audience. That just wasn’t in the cards for this film.