Perhaps the roadblock facing “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” is that, aside from the shoddy plotting and even shoddier special effects, there’s nothing to actually explore about the origins of its titular character outside of what any of the three “X-Men” movies covered. Origin stories are something of a necessity: and also dull: for most superhero movies, but Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine always worked best shrouded in mystery.
But “X-Men” has become a license to print money in the house that Tom Rothman wrought, and so we get this wholly unnecessary spin-off promising to reveal all about this snappy, broody anti-hero.
A rather old anti-hero for that matter: “Wolverine” opens in 1845 in Canada, where we meet Logan and his brother, Victor, as young boys. After a family spat, both brothers run off into the woods and proceed to spend the next 145 years fighting through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War in a cleverly edited opening credit montage. Later, the brothers join a secret mutant task force headed by Maj. William Stryker (Danny Huston), but Logan deserts after said task force decides to massacre an entire village in Nigeria while Victor (Liev Schrieber) stays. All of this in the first fifteen minutes of the film.
There’s a movie in the conflict between Victor and Logan, with Victor embracing his wild side while Logan shoulders the burden of his mutation, but the script by David Benioff and Skip Woods decides to skip over these character contrasts in favor of a calvacade of second-string mutant cameos and incomprehensible fight scenes. You have to wonder why the filmmakers decided to hire a capable actor like Schrieber if he only gets to show up with a severe case of mutton chops and snarl at Jackman. Victor is integral to Logan’s growth, but the relationship between the two is shoehorned in favor of explosions that would give Michael Bay an orgasm and breezy PG-13 violence.
For that matter, we never get a sense of who Wolverine is either. Jackman’s character is, for lack of a better word, declawed throughout most of the film. Ever since Christopher Nolan injected his own brand of “realism” into the “Batman” film franchise, every other filmmaker has decided that gloom and angst are needed for normally cheerful superheroes. Unfortunately, they also forget that darkness doesn’t automatically equal complexity, and when the normally charismatic Jackman shrieks up into the sky and yells, “Nooooo!”, you have to wonder if director Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi,” which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005) was creating a parody of a bad 80s action film to deliberately piss off 20th Century Fox head honcho Rothman for mucking with the film during production. Jackman still looks the part, with broad shoulders and vein-y biceps, but the quips and machismo are missing as “Wolverine” devolves into your generic revenge-chase film in the style of the “Bourne” films.
That’s what plagues “Wolverine” in the end: It never seems to justify its existence outside of creating a new franchise to fill Fox’s coffers. Where it sidelines character, it replaces with a climax of mutant-on-mutant fights (on top of a nuclear reactor), stunts and a ridiculous anti-climax involving a memory bullet. For a film that claims to tell us all about everyone’s favorite mutant, there isn’t much there to care about.
