Gavin Hood’s prequel opens with two brothers fighting through a century of wars under the credits, then spends the rest of its 107 minutes explaining a man better left unexplained. Jackman and Schreiber hold their end; the effects and the script let go of theirs.
Wolverine arrived in the first X-Men film as a man with knives in his hands and no idea where they came from, and that was most of his appeal. X-Men Origins: Wolverine exists to answer the question, and David Benioff and Skip Woods’s script answers it the way a biography would: a childhood, a brother, a war record, a woman, a betrayal. Gavin Hood directs at a run, and the whole thing is over in 107 minutes.
The opening is the best stretch, and most of the reviews so far agree on that. A boy discovers that bone claws come out of his hands when he is angry, and he and his half-brother run into the night. Under the credits they fight through a century of American wars, trench after beach after jungle, Victor enjoying it more each time, and Harry Gregson-Williams keeps the orchestra low and lets the pictures do the work. We sat up. Then Stryker (Danny Huston) collects them into a squad with Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) talking through every fight, Agent Zero (Daniel Henney) shooting, and John Wraith (will.i.am), Fred Dukes (Kevin Durand) and Bradley (Dominic Monaghan) filling out the plane, and for a quarter of an hour the film looks like a nasty little men-on-a-mission picture. Reynolds is funny. Then Logan walks away from it, and the film goes to the mountains with him.
Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber are the reason to keep watching. Jackman has played this part before and knows exactly how much growl it can take; here he is given grief as well as rage, and he carries both without fuss. Schreiber’s Victor Creed is better still, a man who runs on all fours and loves it, and who smiles at his brother across a field of bodies as if to say, admit it, you like this too. Their scenes together have a weight nothing else in the film has. Huston plays Stryker soft and reasonable, a bureaucrat with a clipboard and a scalpel, and he is quietly the most frightening thing on screen.
The script is the problem, from the moment Logan takes up logging in the Rockies with Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins), a schoolteacher who tells a fable about the moon as if she expects to be quoted. The lines are the kind actors deliver while looking at the floor. Every new mutant is a cameo with a power attached: Taylor Kitsch’s Remy LeBeau gets a card trick, a stick and one fight; Tim Pocock’s Scott Summers gets a pair of sunglasses and a corridor. The film keeps introducing people as if introductions were a plot. By the midpoint we had stopped learning names.
Donald McAlpine shoots the mountains and the lumber yard clean and bright, with real cold in the air, and the one set piece that works, Logan on a motorbike against a helicopter on a country road, is staged wide enough to follow. The rest of the fighting is cut by Megan Gill and Nicolas De Toth into pieces too short to read, with the camera so close that two sets of claws become a grey smear. The claws themselves are the film’s most public failure. They are drawn by computer, they catch no light, and when Logan studies them in a bathroom mirror they look like something from a cereal packet. We laughed, and it was not the laugh the film wanted. Barry Robison’s laboratory for Stryker, all concrete and water tanks, is solid and anonymous, and Gregson-Williams, so patient over the credits, settles into the same brass hit for every entrance.
The second half takes turns we will not describe, except to say that the film gets louder as it gets emptier and that the last reel stacks revelation on revelation until none of them lands. Somewhere in there we were bored, and then we were annoyed, because the opening had promised a film about two brothers who could not die and could not stop, and that film never gets made. Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men films were about people afraid of being found out. This one is about getting Logan from one fight to the next.
If you want Wolverine, the earlier films have him, and they knew enough not to explain him. If you want this one, see it for Schreiber and the first fifteen minutes, and do not expect the 12A to let anyone bleed.
