I feel sorry for Hugh Jackman

Rating: 5/10 (29 July 2013)

The Wolverine is one of the better made super-hero flicks of its era. Screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank have come up with a story that's better than Spider-Man 1 or 3, Iron Man 2 or 3, either Hulk movie and both Captain America and Thor combined. Director James Mangold also does fine work, though many of the action scenes suffer from the modern blight of camera movement that's so frenetic you can barely tell who is hitting whom. The special effects are solid and even the soundtrack is well done. And the cast, highlighted by the tremendous Hugh Jackman, is as appealing as you'll find. There's almost every ingredient here you need to make a great motion picture. The one thing missing, however, is so important that it negates almost everything positive.
Wolverine is not a great character. Yes, I know. He's the most popular comic book creation of the last 40 years and has joined, if not surpassed, Batman, Superman and Spider-Man in the hearts of super-hero fans. That's still doesn't change the fact that he's not a great character. Or to be more accurate, that's he's only a great character in the limited role for which he was originally conceived. Wolverine was created to be a one-off opponent for the Hulk and then was hauled out of mothballs to join a revamped X-Men roster and as a rebel anti-hero in opposition to or operating alongside more traditional heroic types, Logan is a whole lot of fun. On his own as the emotional and narrative heart of a story, he's a whole lot of one-note nothing.
Wolverine is nothing more than adolescent badassery given form. He has none of the natural depth of Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne. Those characters are enmeshed with bigger concepts like responsibility, guilt, compulsion and myriad other things. Wolverine is about nothing more than looking, talking and acting "cool" and every attempt to graft more onto him ultimately fails. This film ambitiously tries to build off both Logan's sense of loss from killing Jean Grey in X-Men: The Last Stand and his weariness over decades of battle-torn existence to give him some pathos, then strips him of his healing factor to try and make him slightly vulnerable. But adolescent badassery and vulnerability never mix and by the end of the movie, Logan is back to getting skewered through the chest by a katana and shrugging it off like it was a splinter. The super power that originally meant he could recover from a non-fatal gunshot in a day has metastasized into every boy's fantasy of never being hurt by anything.
And if you think I'm wrong, ask yourself this. What are the best Wolverine moments on the big screen. They're all from the first two X-flicks, aren't they? Moments when he may have been the star but shared the screen and story with others. Or why did they need to go back to a 4 issue limited series from 30 years ago for the guts of this motion picture? No one wrote a Wolvie story-arc in the last 20 years that was good enough for the job?
In many respects, this movie helps to solidify the standard of quality by which the whole genre should be judged. It really is that good in so many ways. But just because a comic book character is popular, that doesn't mean he or she can carry an entire film.