As Excellent As Wolverine’s Final Movie Was, It Left Me Wanting
First of all, Logan was an excellent movie. It was one of the best X-Men films Fox ever produced and it was without a doubt the best standalone Wolverine movie they ever made (though the previous two films didn’t exactly set the bar too high quality wise).
But . . .
You’re probably wondering what I’m doing talking about a movie that debuted in theatres over a year ago. Bear with me. While writing about my favourite movies of 2017, the choice for my favourite comic book movie came down to two entries; Wonder Woman and Logan. Both were fantastic movies about two of my favourite characters. While Princess Diana won in the end, Logan was very close second.
But a familiar feeling crept over me while I was contemplating Logan’s strengths. It was the same feeling I had coming out of the theatre a year ago. There was no doubt Logan was a more than fitting conclusion to Wolverine’s cinematic story (or at least this incarnation), but something felt wrong. Something felt like it was missing.
It took me a while to put my finger on it but the problem is we never really got a Wolverine movie.
Follow me for a second. Look at Christopher Nolan’s outstanding Batman trilogy as an example. We saw Bruce Wayne’s evolution into The Dark Knight in Batman Begins. We saw the pivotal deaths of his parents, the transformative impact that tragedy had on him and the roots of his decision to transform into something more (and darker) than himself. We saw his training, his devotion and his inexperienced mistakes. Eventually it all culminated into him donning the cloak and cowl and giving rise to a legend.
We saw a worn down, nearly broken Bruce Wayne return to the life he abandoned and endure near physical and psychological destruction to save his city one final time in The Dark Knight Rises (one of the ingenious things about Nolan’s vision was that, as a pragmatic look at how such a character would exist in the real world, Batman was forced into retirement after a few years on Gotham’s rooftops by his gruesome collection of injuries). It was a fitting conclusion to both Batman’s story and his legend.
But we got the strongest chapter of the story in between as we watched Batman pitted against his greatest nemesis in The Dark Knight. We got to see him at his infallible peak facing the ruthless and violent machinations of The Joker. In The Dark Knight, we got to see Batman as he will forever be immortalized; a primal, nearly unbeatable force of justice.
Each chapter of Nolan’s masterpiece depicted an essential step in Batman’s journey; his rise, his prime and his end. And it should come as no surprise that most people’s favourite (and the most financially successful) was the middle, where we got to see Batman at the top of his ass kicking game.
We never got to see that chapter in Wolverine’s story.
In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, we saw him turned into the hero we would meet in X-Men. He was all bone and attitude for the first half of the movie, essentially incomplete until he got his adamantium. He spent most of The Wolverine stripped of his healing factor and reduced as a result. In Logan we saw him at the end of his two hundred year long life, his healing factor failing and no longer able to keep the either the ravages of age or the poison from his adamantium skeleton at bay. Injuries that healed in mere seconds before now brought him to him his knees.
He was near sighted, he walked with a limp and got winded easily. He needed glasses to read, he woke up hacking and coughing and was easily snuck up on. He was Old Man Logan and not The Wolverine. And the shame of it is, aside from a few scenes in previous (and much worse) movies, we never really got to see The Wolverine at his fierce, unstoppable best.
It can be argued that we got to see that guy a few times in some of the X-Men movies, but it would have been nice to see it in one of his standalone films. Could you imagine an R-rated Wolverine film about the final battle between him and Sabretooth? With both men at the height of their powers? Or a no holds barred, rated R showdown with Omega Red (who we never got to see)?
The truth is we never really got the Wolverine we loved from the comics in the movies. The original Wolverine was a living weapon struggling to hold on to what was left of his humanity. He was a man built to be a killing machine who spent well over a century being moulded by special forces, samurai and ninjas before he got the metal. His training rivalled that of Batman and was combined with mutant powers and homicidal tendencies.
While I’m not complaining and the character we got wasn’t bad (especially when he was allowed to cut loose, pun intended), it would have been nice to see the man known as Weapon X.
These points may soon be moot as either Disney or Universal are destined to reboot the character in the near future (keep and eye on who wins that particular bidding war). Getting a Wolverine closer to the Marvel comics version would be a nice change of pace. But either way, when they do go with solo movies (and it’s only a matter to time), getting at least one movie where Logan brings his blood drenched A game to the screen should be the top priority.
His fans deserve it.
Image 20th Century Fox
