X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Since he joined the X-Men in the mid-1970s, the clawed Canadian mutant brawler Wolverine has always claimed to be “the best there is at what I do, but what I do isn’t very nice.” And for most of Wolverine’s comic book escapades, it wasn’t really clear what he did, apart from kick ass, smoke cigars and grow epic facial hair. The character’s origins were kept shadowy, with vague hints that Wolverine (known only as “Logan” when not in costume) had done everything from fighting in World War II alongside Captain America to becoming a ninja in Japan. As new writers took on the character, Wolverine’s past got increasingly confusing, but his core elements—a life marked by tragedy, betrayal and rage and augmented with uncanny healing abilities and an unbreakable skeleton—remained the same.

Wolverine has always been the most popular of all the X-Men (he currently appears or stars in at least a half-dozen comics each month), and when the X-Men made their transition to the big screen in 2001, the character, as played by Hugh Jackman, quickly became the focal point of the franchise. When it comes to flagging film franchises, even the slightest ambiguities can be mined for new cinematic chapters, and so it goes that “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” arrives on scene, partly to reveal the true past of America’s favorite mutant and partly to help boost the X-Men films that stalled out after 2006’s “X-Men: The Last Stand.” If anything, the movie should have been big dumb fun, but everyone, including Jackman and director Gavin Hood, tackle the proceedings with such grim seriousness that “Wolverine” winds up being mediocre at best and a big dumb growling match at its worst.

One of the growlers is always Jackman, who spends much of his time screaming, shouting, stabbing and looking sorrowful. He’s got plenty to be sad about. Born as James Howlett in the mid-19th century on an estate in Canada, his powers—piercing claws made of bone that pop out from between his knuckles and fast-acting healing—manifest themselves during a tense domestic incident between his mother, his father, and the estate’s groundskeeper, who turns out to be Wolverine’s real dad. Those claws end up killing some folk, and so James and his brother, Victor, run off into the night. That tableau could be enough for a whole movie, but that’s just the pre-credit sequence. James and Victor (played as an adult by Live Schreiber), also a mutant, end up fighting together in the last 100 years’ worth of wars, join a secret government strike team, have a falling out, growl at each other a lot and become bitter enemies. This also could have been enough for a feature, but it turns out to be the first third of Wolverine’s increasingly convoluted tale.

That desire to condense a 160-year-old character’s entire life into 90 minutes isn’t the biggest problem “Wolverine” faces, but it’s a considerable obstacle. By the time Wolverine gets his fancy metal skeleton courtesy of Gen. William Stryker (Danny Huston, doing his best Patton impression), fatigue sets in and you may wonder where else the movie can go. There are plenty of other stops along the way, though, from Wolverine’s love affair with Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins) and a couple showdowns with his brother (now going by the moniker Sabretooth) to a fight in New Orleans with another mutant and a confrontation with Stryker on Three Mile Island. The movie ponderously jumps all over the place, and events happen so fast it’s hard to care about any of them.

Jackman deserves some credit, though, as he struggles to infuse the rather thin script by David Benioff and Skip Woods with some actual meat. But Wolverine’s relationships and his past (He’s in Canada! Now he’s in the Civil War! Oh look, it’s Vietnam!) are sketched out too hastily and there’s precious little time to get close to the character. In the previous three “X-Men” films, Jackman had Wolverine’s uncertainty on his side, and those subtle hints of past wrongs and painful burdens helped make Jackman’s performance. He also had a few opportunities to crack a joke, but that humor is noticeably absent here. But with Wolverine’s history on full display, and hampered by clumsy dialogue and poor direction, all those titanic tragedies don’t seem like a big deal.

Gavin Hood tries desperately to make them a big deal, though, but does so in some fairly pedestrian ways. If there’s any opportunity to have a character kneel on the ground and scream at the sky, Hood takes it; the same goes for scene after scene of Wolverine and Sabretooth snarling and then charging at each other from a short distance. Moments of levity, which are desperately needed in a scowl-fest like this, become embarrassing—a boxing match between Wolverine and The Blob, a fellow mutant with a weight problem, is meant to be comic relief, but the sight Wolverine’s deadly claws popping out of a boxing glove isn’t so much funny as it is just sort of dumb.

“Wolverine” does get a few moments of dumb-in-a-good-way fun in, though. Wolverine’s journey to the Big Easy to meet a mutant named Gambit (Taylor Kitsch) results in a neat back-alley showdown, and the climactic battle between Wolverine and super-mutant Weapon XI (Scott Adkins) delivers the sort of action the rest of the film desperately needs. The supporting cast is pretty good, too, though highly underused. Wolverine’s black-ops team includes Ryan Reynolds as a wisecracking swordsman and Dominic Monaghan as a telekinetic. But those characters disappear as fast as they make the scene, and Jackman is left alone to trudge along glumly. Super-serious trudging isn’t one of the things Wolverine should be best at, but it’s the only ability the film exercises to any effect. When it comes to the blood-soaked pasts of troubled mutants, the less said, the better.