In the beginning, there were daddy issues.
A young Jimmy Logan, chronically ill and without the faintest hopes of becoming as cool as Hugh Jackman, watches his father leave his bedside to attend to those angry knock-knock-knockings at the door. One gunshot later, and Logan is out of bed and running downstairs to the sight of his father lying dead on the ground, filling him with so much rage that bony blades grow out of his hands, which he promptly sticks into the gut of whoever that guy with the shotgun is.
But wait! It turns out that guy was actually Logan’s father, not the dead man on the floor, and there you have it: the Freudian trauma that created Wolverine. Want to know why anyone had a shotgun in the first place? Or why Jimmy Logan has deadly weapons built into his hands? Or how such a scrawny little kid grew up to have so much chest hair? Sorry, you’ll have to make something up on your own.
There is a difference between a prequel and an origin story, but don’t let the title fool you into thinking “Wolverine” is much of the latter. The major questions about Logan’s beginnings ““ how he got the metal skeleton, the nickname, and the memory loss ““ are explained with a few brief and heavily contrived plot tangents. Others, such as why he can heal himself, are ignored entirely. And forget about character development. Unlike Peter Parker having to learn to shoot his web, apparently Logan is a natural.
Of course, there are two reasons the “X-Men” franchise barreled through three films and kept on going, and neither of them have to do with quality screenwriting. Such an indulgence is fairly unnecessary in this case, what with the combination of impossibly cool action sequences and Hugh Jackman’s face. Okay, his body, too, and yes, it’s featured prominently this time around. Jackman’s acting isn’t bad, either. He borrows maybe a bit too much from the Christian Bale school of growling, but he deserves credit for keeping a straight face and pretending he’s in a movie that makes sense.
In fact, the same can be said for most of the cast; unfortunately, the best of the lot are barely in the movie. Ex-hobbit Dominic Monaghan and the usually vacuous Ryan Reynolds are both supremely entertaining as fellow mutants in Logan’s special military unit, but neither of them get more than 10 minutes of screen time. Similarly snubbed is will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas fame, who disappears just when you start thinking about him as a real actor.
Fortunately, Liev Schrieber doesn’t get the same treatment. He clearly enjoyed every minute as Victor Creed, Logan’s brother and the mutant to be known as Sabretooth. His one-liners (and there are quite a few) are always delightfully snarky, and the fraternal showdowns between Victor and Logan are vicious brawls that nearly make up for all the film’s shortcomings.
Still, this was supposed to be an origin story, and it could have been a good one if Logan and Victor had stuck with the mutants played by Reynolds and Monaghan and the rest of the gang. Their superhuman band of brothers had both tension and chemistry; instead, writers David Benioff (“The Kite Runner”) and Skip Woods (“Hitman”) decided to cut short a good thing and digress through an unconvincing romantic interlude, a completely unnecessary boxing match with an obese old friend, and a vaguely sinister world-domination plot.
If we’re to expect a series of these “X-Men” prequels, as the title seems to imply, it’s worth pointing out that you can only coast through the box office as a Hugh Jackman vehicle if Hugh Jackman is playing the main character. The others will have to rely on some more coherent storytelling, and the fact that there are plenty of other mutants with cooler superpowers. I eagerly await “X-Men Origins: Toad.”
E-mail Goodman at agoodman@media.ucla.edu.