Anghus Houvouras believes it’s time for Hugh Jackman to pass the torch to a new Wolverine…
I think it’s time for a new Wolverine. Not just a new direction for the character, but a new actor in the role. While watching the trailer for The Wolverine, I had this fleeting feeling that I couldn’t believe it had been over ten years since we first saw Hugh Jackman in the role. X-Men feels like ages ago. One of the first films to launch the current wave of comic book adaptations, Bryan Singer’s simple and highly effective first foray into Marvel’s Mutants is still remarkably spry. Oh sure, there are a number of things that date the film horribly like some really goofy FX work and lines of dialogue best left unspoken. The movie got so many things right. One of them being the role of Wolverine.
The role had originally gone to Dougray Scott who ended up having to back out of the production due to a filming conflict with Mission: Impossible II. So the role went to a then unknown Aussie with the porn star name propelling him to international superstardom. Jackman’s Wolverine was an effective piece of a larger picture. Well weighted with other interesting characters like Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s excellent rendition of Magneto.
X2: X-Men United built on the strengths of the first film and delivered even better ensemble super hero adventure featuring a wide variety of characters. Wolverine was driving much of the story forward but there were a dozen other well developed roles helping pull the weight.
X-Men: The Last Stand was a blight that should be purged from our collective memories. Terrible scripting, pedestrian directing, and bereft of the originality Singer brought to the series. The third X-Men film exposed a lot of fundamental flaws to the adaptation. Even the ones Singer helmed, and it boils down to the idea of transforming Wolverine from Han Solo to Luke Skywalker.
Wolverine is Han Solo. He’s the rebellious, dangerous, well intentioned rogue who can be the reluctant hero when the time comes. A blunt instrument designed to inflict damage. The character in the first two films fits that bill. He’s dragged into a conflict he wants nothing to do with only ascending to the role of hero because it happens to have fallen into his eye line. The first X-Men film gives him a link to this world in Rogue. He has to protect her. Professor X’s ongoing conflict with Magneto forces his clawed hand.
X2 provides a similar conundrum. Wolverine wants to find out the truth about his identity and he goes in search for answers. That search invariably leads to crossing paths with William Stryker and his anti-mutant agenda. Once again, Wolverine is looking to save the world. He’s after his own selfish interests and reluctantly is pulled into the fray.
The third film takes him off the rails. It turns him into the leader of the group and layers on a lot of pointless relationships turning him from the reluctant hero to the typical superhero savior. The Wolverine of X-Men: The Last Stand is a composite character combining the traits of Wolverine and Cyclops. By merging them into one basic character, they de-clawed one of Marvel’s most iconic characters.
The Wolverine of X-Men 3 and the laughably bad X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a toothless leading man with no real sense of identity or purpose. Visually, he hits the marks, but the character had been transformed into something soft and mushy. They filmmakers shoehorned in a relationship with Jean Grey to mirror the comics, but took away the back story of all the years spent with Cyclops. Wolverine and Jean Grey share no history. Within the course of the first two X-Men movies, there is an implied attraction between them but no real relationship. To simply hand all the gravitas and emotion to Wolverine in the third was a disservice to the whole storyline. Let’s be real honest here. The mistakes of X-Men 3 don’t really require a deep dive.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine further exacerbate the problems with X-Men 3. Wolverine is a tortured soul with special powers that often feel more like a curse than a blessing. He’s saddled with family issues and is presented less as a wild animal and more like the leading man in a Harlequin romance novel. I understand the concept of softening the character for film, to make him more accessible to the ladies, but the Wolverine of X-Men Origins was a ridiculous confection.
One of the other problems with the cinematic Wolverine is his woefully lacking killer instinct. In most of the movies, Wolverine is on the receiving end of an ass whooping. There is little evidence of the brutal weapon that exists in the comics. Whether he’s getting smacked around on the top of the Statue of Liberty, or getting his ass handed to him by another weaponized mutant, the Wolverine of the movies is kind of a pushover.
Perhaps the new film will change all this. Maybe we’re finally going to get a fierce, deadly scrapper that we’ve been hoping for since the character was first brought to cinemas over a decade ago. Maybe James Mangold will bring us a new Wolverine. Because the old one is kind of boring.
I also think we need to start thinking about someone else in the role. Recently Jackman said he’d like to see a movie with Wolverine, The Avengers, and Spider-Man. Something every comic fan would love to see come to fruition. However, I’m thinking maybe it’s time for Jackman to hang up the claws. He did an admirable job over the span of five movies. The last couple of films were saddled with terrible material that I doubt any actor could have done better with. If The Wolverine continues the trend of lackluster films, then maybe Jackman’s appearance in Days of Future Past would be a fitting swan song. Then, the hunt for a new Wolverine could begin.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
