Given the mixed critical reception to The Last Stand, to say nothing of how it seemed to signal an end to the franchise (with director Ratner directly saying as much in February 2006), the studio was left with an issue: how to exploit the popularity of series mainstay Hugh Jackman and his Wolverine character. The answer seemed to be to grant the character his own movie in what was originally intended to be the first entry in a series of ‘Origins’ stories that would allow the studio to re-use the characters in prequels without disturbing the continuity of the main franchise. But, asks Greg D. Smith, could relatively obscure director Gavin Hood deliver a version of David Benioff (yes that one) and Skip Woods’ script that would satisfy fans of the comic books and of the cinematic iteration of the character?

Unkillable mutant James Logan and his brother Victor fight through history in a variety of wars before Victor’s temper finally lands the pair of them in front of a firing squad and then in a black ops team. After Logan leaves military life sickened at what he is ordered to do, he thinks he has escaped his old life until it catches up to him in the most brutal of ways.

If there’s a film in the Fox X-Men universe canon that’s more unloved than The Last Stand, it’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It didn’t help the movie’s cause that an early version of it with unfinished visual FX leaked online, but in fairness the finished product wasn’t all that well-received either. And on this re-watch I have to confess that despite long having maintained that the film was a harmless bit of action movie silliness, it’s difficult to argue against this just being a bad movie, both in its genre, its series, and just in general.

For starters, the film fails to tie in with its own franchise very well. It’s not just that Danny Huston’s William Stryker is very obviously not Brian Cox (oddly, Cox wanted the role but Huston was the actor already in negotiations for it) or that Professor Xavier is still walking and looks basically like Patrick Stewart with some very ropey CGI blurring of his wrinkles. It isn’t even things like the Alkali Lake facility looking significantly different, the whole procedure of the adamantium implantation looking very different from the flashbacks granted us in previous movies or props as simple as the dog tags being wrong. No one element on its own cracks the solidity of the film as an entry in its own franchise, but so many pile up, one on top of another, that it becomes difficult to ignore.

Compounding this, the film is so very eager to shoehorn in references to the other films and the wider X-Men universe as a whole that it detracts from what it’s ostensibly here to do – focus on the titular character. There’s a certain irony to the fact that when the character finally gets a movie of his own, with his name on the title, the studio apparently loses interest in focusing on his story.

And that’s a shame because elements throughout the movie point to a much better story being present beneath the layers of what we end up with. The opening being set in 1845 with us getting to see the very genesis of the character and his brother Victor as they come into their powers is a bold move, but then the film uses a montage during its opening credits to illustrate the various wars through 100 or so years of history in which the brothers fight, from the American Civil War through to Vietnam.

Two factors here bother me. The first is the simple fact that this feels like a wasted opportunity to tell the stories of those wars and the adventures the brothers had in them – how these might have shaped the character of Wolverine himself and how they might have shaped and/or highlighted the split between the two brothers in terms of personality and disposition. The second is that the movie makes sure to put the brothers on a very definite side – in the civil war they’re with the Yankees, in World War 1 and 2 the Americans, then they’re fighting in the US Army in Vietnam. Why would a pair of mutants, living in the X-Men universe as we have seen on screen to date, go from fighting against slavery in the time of Lincoln to fighting for a capitalist war machine stomping down on a smaller country? And how interesting must the story be that got them there? Doesn’t matter, the film shrugs casually, they were in all those wars as you can see from this cool montage and there it is.

Picking up off the end of this as they face a firing squad and then get drafted by Huston’s Stryker to be part of his team, the movie then skips ahead again, dumping us in a mission in which Logan is visibly uncomfortable as the team raid an African diamond smuggler’s compound to grab some adamantium and find out where the rest is, then skipping again to the village where it was found to have him stomp off in a huff at what they’re being asked to do.

The issue here is that the film expects us to see Logan as the better man for walking away, but as we have no real frame of reference, the question becomes why we should care? How long has Logan been doing these missions? What has he done previously in them? What did he do in the wars he fought for that matter? Why is it that he didn’t walk away after physically having to restrain his brother from mowing down civilians from a helicopter in Vietnam? What’s more heinous about this particular intended massacre of villagers now? How is he helping the villagers by walking away from a group of men who seem quite intent on killing them all whether he’s there or not? How is this a hero narrative when the apparently immortal and unkillable soldier with over a century’s experience of fighting just looks a bit sad about the impending massacre of innocents and then sticks out his bottom lip and walks away from it?

Then the movie skips forward another few years, and we get introduced to literally the only female character of significance in the entire film. And it’s Wolverine’s girlfriend. Who then gets apparently fridged by the script after we’ve been treated to a couple of slow, intimate scenes between the two of them so we can appreciate Logan’s softer side. Those scenes alone make for uncomfortable viewing – while it’s been clear from early on that Jackman has charisma and screen presence to spare, he can’t quite sell a genuine romantic relationship as opposed to the sort of bad boy flirting of the previous films. It doesn’t exactly help matters that the dialogue he’s given to work with ranges from cringe-worthy romantic lines to stuff they’ve shoehorned in there to tick off quotes from the comics (his ‘I’m the best at what I do and what I do isn’t very nice’ line being a particularly egregious and shoehorned example).

Having apparently lost the love of his life (we assume – the man is over 100 years old but we’ve skipped most of that so we’ll just take the script’s word for it) he is then somehow tempted back into Stryker’s service to get the adamantium implanted, then Stryker immediately says out loud that he’s going to mindwipe him and…OK let’s just take it as read that the plot to this one is convoluted, illogical and hugely nonsensical and say no more about it. There are so many elements where it’s obvious that the visual idea was ‘wouldn’t it look cool if..?’ and then the script was left to somehow try to make sense of it that it just gets foolish even trying to count.

So let’s talk about characters. Schreiber as Victor/Sabretooth is a great choice. Though only an inch taller than Jackman, he makes that difference count, looming over his ‘baby brother’ and bringing a calm, calculated menace which can suddenly erupt into violence to the role. It’s nice to have an actual character for Sabretooth but again, it can’t help but feel that the potential that Schreiber brings is wasted by simply not giving him enough to do or enough background.

The same applies to the rest of Wolverine’s ‘squad mates’ under Stryker. Will.i.am’s John Wraith offers an intriguing character, the pop star’s natural presence making his almost total lack of use feel all the worse. Kevin Durand’s Dukes gets little to do in flashback scenes and then becomes a walking fat joke in the present, Dominic Monaghan’s part could easily be filled by a cardboard standee, counting as an utter waste of a genuinely talented actor, and Daniel Henney’s Agent Zero gets at least some decent back and forth dialogue with Jackman and one or two mildly exciting action scenes before the script seems to have a fit of the vapours in fear he might outshine the star and kills him off.

Ryan Reynolds shines as Wade Wilson, right up until he gets made into ‘The Deadpool’ or ‘Weapon 11’ (and the less said about that here the better) but again he gets so little to actually do as the ‘Merc with a mouth’ that it’s over before it’s really started. Huston does his best with Stryker, but the script loses any of the complexity the character might have had, settling instead for a scenery chewer who never thinks too far ahead and acts just as impulsively and irrationally as any scientific military officer wouldn’t.

Lynn Collins, as the literal token woman, does her best with what is possibly the least rewarding female role in an X-Men movie to date (and yes, I’m including the eternally sidelined Halle Berry as Storm) but it’s difficult to escape the simple truth that she’s there to function as a plot device, showing us in the second act that Logan has a mushy side, and in the third giving us the shock reveal that allows him to utter some fatuous twaddle dialogue about not making the mistake of being nice again or something – honestly the detail escapes me at this point because it’s that dull.

As to Jackman himself, the film struggles to know how best to deploy him. Not enough is explored of his relationship to Victor, his past or what exactly he did do during the various wars he fought in (and for Stryker). Given that the previous movies built up the character so much as having a dark past (and given how eager this one is to spew exposition at the audience about how very bad a boy he is) it does nothing to capitalise on any of that potential. It’s mainly just – as I’ve said above – scene after scene where you can see that someone has gone ‘Wouldn’t it look awesome if he did this with his claws?’ and then a poor scriptwriter has been left to somehow try to construct an actual scene around it. Regardless, Jackman’s talents lie in the brooding antihero softened slightly by a dark sense of humour and a heart of gold. Here, he is adrift in the scenes where he has to be the dutiful partner in a loving relationship, or even the friendly stranger to people who help him. You can almost feel him yearning for another scene with a bit of screaming and jumping around every time the film hits these slower parts.

What we are left with then, is a bit of a mess. The story it tells is far more complicated than it needed to be, and focuses on all the wrong details. It feels in hindsight like an entire trilogy’s worth of material was just in this script – a genuine origin movie starting with his gaining his powers and ending with the offer from Stryker, a middle chapter following his and Victor’s black ops career and his eventual disillusionment with the life it presents that leads to him walking away, and a concluding chapter of Stryker returning to haunt him, and his being dragged into his old life, acquiring the adamantium and finally losing his memory, so we could end with him walking into that dive bar in Canada where Rogue first meets him. Instead, the film crams all three elements into one screenplay, skipping past the interesting bits and forcing stuff nobody wanted or cared about in its place. If it stands to be remembered for anything at all, it’s a masterclass in exactly how not to adapt a character for film.