Dir. Gavin Hood, Australia/USA/Canada, 2009, 107 mins
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston
Review by Carol Allen
This prequel to the X Men series tells the story of how Logan (Jackman) becomes the Wolverine we know and love. It's high concept, high octane cinema, loaded with spectacular special effects, often very funny and really good entertainment.
It also has loads of story. In the title sequence we meet Logan and his elder brother - later to become Victor a.k.a Sabretooth (Schreiber) - when they are children, discovering their mutant powers as a result of a family tragedy. We see them fighting side by side through the American Civil War, the First and Second World Wars and Vietnam, and the story proper hasn't even started yet. They are then recruited by Stryker (Huston) into his Team X of mutant fighters, but eventually sickened by Stryker's methods and his own brother's brutality in battle, Logan leaves the unit and retires to a quiet and idyllic life as a logger in Canada with his beloved Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). When Victor tracks him down and kills Kayla, Logan is bent on revenge, dagger knuckles at the ready and eventually falls back into the hands of Stryker, who is conducting experiments on mutants converting them into super weapons of mass destruction and he turns Logan into the adamantium and indestructible killing machine of the other X-men movies. And that's just the short version. There is, as I said, a lot of story for your money here.
The mutant tricks are as usual spectacular, acrobatic and imaginative. There's Logan's best mate from the Team X days, teleporter Wraith (Will I. Am), who sort of jump cuts his way around the scene; wisecracking Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), who fields bullets at lightening speed with his swordplay and meets a sticky fate at the hands of Stryker's Frankenstein style experiments; and kinetic energy manipulator Gambit (Remy LeBeau), who uses his powers for poker as well as blowing holes in walls and people. The action is violent but of the cartoon variety, the stunts distinctly breathtaking and the sometimes melodramatic story line is well laced with humour.
Jackman, muscled up to resemble Schwarzenegger's physique in his body building days, not only deserves his title of the world's sexiest man (though for my money he's even sexier when skinnier) but he is also a good actor, who engages our sympathies for Logan's plight. There's a very sweet sequence involving an elderly couple, who find him hiding naked in their barn and adopt him temporarily as their surrogate son. Huston makes a good, quietly obsessed villain, while Schreiber appears at times to be the feral personification of pure evil. Not a lot for women in this, though Collins has some good moments and there's also a fun cameo appearance from Patrick Stewart as Xavier towards the end of the movie.
If you're an X-men fan, you'll have a ball making all the connections with the original saga and the other movies. But even if you've never seen an X-Men movie in your life, this one stands alone on its merits as a thoroughly entertaining piece of cinema.
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