X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Director: Gavin Hood
Screenwriters: David Benioff, Skip Woods
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Lynn Collins, Ryan Reynolds
Running time: 108 mins
Certificate: 12A

Hugh Jackman goes back to his roots in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, reprising the role that made him a star and which saved the franchise from a tendency of fluffiness. That's because Wolverine is a hairy, snarling man's man, a sweaty cigar-chomping lumberjack, but he wouldn't be half as interesting without a soft spot. It's been an undercurrent of previous films and the temptation to scrape that wound - inflicted by Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) and the lover he killed (Lynn Collins) - is hard to resist. Unfortunately director Gavin Hood, who married action and melodrama in Tsotsi, doesn't have as deft a feel for this material. The thrills are purely primal.

A bold opener reveals the animal lurking inside the little boy (Troye Mellet) who grows up to be Wolverine. Overwhelmed by rage, he sprouts bony claws and kills his own father, only realising this as the man takes his last breath. The audacity of the scene is brilliant, but the staging is OTT. The tone continues to shift throughout from darkness to light. Hood cuts quickly through subsequent decades as Wolverine (then known as Logan) fights two World Wars and the Vietnam conflict within a special unit, Team X, alongside fellow mutant Sabretooth (a.k.a. Victor). The script embellishes on the comic by making them half-brothers, a shortcut to heightening the tension when Wolverine decides he's had enough killing and walks away.

For Sabretooth, it's the opposite; serving under Colonel William Stryker (the devilish Danny Huston stepping into Brian Cox's shoes) allows him to satisfy a bloodlust. Six years later, he also gets a chance to 'stick it' to little brother when he's ordered to hunt him down. The Colonel aims to exploit Wolverine for development of the Weapon X programme, which is geared towards harnessing mutant powers for military might. Sabretooth finds him playing lumberjack in the Canadian Rockies and slays the woman he's been happily shacked up with (Collins). It appears to be a senseless act, but it's the impetus for Wolverine to step voluntarily into Stryker's chemical bath, the promise being that he'll emerge better equipped to carry out his revenge.

The first unsheathing of Wolverine's new metal claws is a spine-tilling moment, raising the flag on more elaborate action to come. It sets up a neat in-joke as well. After Wolverine escapes the facility he hides out in a farmhouse and inadvertently wrecks the place with a flick of the wrist. The comedy doesn't always sit well within the story though. Rather than being incidental, a scene where Wolverine has to beat the truth out of his old army buddy, The Blob, is played chiefly for laughs with actor Kevin Durand wearing a bad fat suit. It's as if Jackman has strayed onto the set a Martin Lawrence comedy. Some of the intensity between Wolverine and Sabretooth is lost because of so much joking around and because they come claw-to-claw too often. That's despite a typically searing performance by Liev Schreiber.

Jackman (who also produced the film) brings the usual gruff charm, but in the end the tragedy of Wolverine's condition - his struggle to reconcile animal instincts with human frailty - never hits quite as hard as the action itself. On the upside, there's plenty of it to keep you distracted from the obligatory jumping on a helicopter bit, to a hilltop motorcycle chase sequence (vaguely reminiscent of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape) and lots of stripped down (literally in Jackman's case) mano-a-mano combat. There are also standout turns from Ryan Reynolds as the clownish yet fearsome Deadpool and Taylor Kitsch as mutant trickster Gambit. It is, in short, a fairground ride of a movie and not the night-time prowl older fans might have expected.


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