Cast: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schriber, Danny Huston, Ryan Reynolds
Director: Gavin Hood
Screenwriters: David Benioff, Skip Woods

Watching Wolverine on DVD is actually a far less disappointing experience than it ws  seeing it on the big screen. Much of that surely has to do with the fact that the insane levels of marketing bombardment ahead of the cinema release basically guaranteed an anticlimax. But if you were to quietly discover this latest installment in the ever-expanding X-Men franchise at home, you’d probably get something better than you expected.

The first 17 minutes, two seconds are brilliant. We are introduced to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine (known as Logan, though he was born James ‘Jimmy’ Howlett, apparently) in the 1800s when he’s still but a boy, and a series of tragic events leads to the death of his dad, and to the realisation that he has a half-brother, Victor. It’s also our first opportunity to see the famous claws emerging from between Jackman’s knuckles, though at this early stage they are made of bone, and not metal (comic book purists are at least satisfied by this). Because of their involvement in what happened, Jimmy and Victor go on the run, promising to look out for each other. Because that’s what brothers do.

A long title sequence (possibly the best bit of the film, and rivalled only by Watchmen in terms of cool montage-through-the-decades slideshows) shows us what Jimmy and Victor (now played by adults Jackman and Liev Schreiber) decided to do when they grew up: fight. They fought in the US War of Independence, in the First and Second World Wars (including a clip of Wolverine running off a amphibian landing craft, a la Saving Private Ryan, with a lit cigar in his mouth), and also in the Vietnam War. What makes them such good soldiers is that they never die. Or rather, they do, but they get better. The pair are mutants, are indestructible, and seemingly immortal. And while Wolverine has his knuckle-claws, Victor has super-long and super-strong fingernails. I’m surprised he hasn’t been signed up by Maybelline yet actually.

But Victor enjoys all the death and destruction a little too much. After their lack of death-by-firing-squad raises a few eyebrows among the military top brass, the duo get a call from Major William Stryker (Danny Huston, who maybe looks slightly like Brian Cox, but actually not really at all). Stryker signs them up to his badass team of mutant special forces, which is deployed to hotspots around the world, GI Joe style. Also in the team are Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), Agent Zero, and John Wraith (played by Will.i.am, I’m afraid, though he’s not quite as ridiculous as you might expect). In there too is Dominic Monaghan as Chris Bradley (Bolt). He seems to be in everything at the moment, including Flashforward. He puts in a fine performance for his limited screentime, though I kept thinking about Driveshaft. In any case, the tactics of the team prove too ruthless and barbaric for Hugh Jackman’s character, and he eventually quits.

After another skip forward in time, we see Jimmy, who’s now calling himself Logan, living in Canada with his girlfriend many years later. After a visit from Stryker, Wolverine’s Mrs is killed by Victor, who has seemingly gone completely mental and is trying to hurt everyone who used to be on the team to stop them revealing his dastardly past.

It’s here where things really start to fall apart for the film – it gets pretty woolly when we get stuck into the storyline and while Wolverine’s motivation is clear  something just doesn’t quite hit the mark and you don’t really feel much emotional involvement at all. The plot itself just isn’t very good, and by the time we reach the end of the film, after Wolvie’s had his Adamantium grafted onto him and there’s been an inevitable final mega-fight on top of a cooling tower, you might be a bit bored. And the gigantic twist which should be the most powerful part of the entire 102 minutes is handled with such speed and dismissed so quickly that it too loses its impact.

That said, there are some standout moments of fantastic action and well thought-out set pieces, particularly the helicopter leap (which was all over the trailer), and several close-combat moments of coolness which certainly equal the other X-movies. There are also a fair number of quite brutal moments, including one of the mutants reaching into the body of another one and grabbing his spine, but much of the action is a bit too fast and confused. In fact, that sums up the film too. If they could take a moment to step back and not worry about packing so much in, this could have been a billion times better.

Hugh Jackman is, as you might expect, by far the best thing about the film, and his energy and commitment to the role is matched only by the size of his enormous upper arms. One finds oneself willing him to go full berserker a bit more often, because it’s in his most animalistic moments that we see a side of Wolverine that was missing in X’s 1-3. The real problem is that most of the emotions and situations we see the tri-clawed one in this time round really aren’t anything new compared with the other films. Perhaps, after all, the character actually isn’t quite deep enough to stretch over 4 movies, no matter what the fans think.

The other actors are pretty good – Liev Schreiber is a much more convincing and vicious Sabretooth (Victor) than you might have thought by looking at him, though Taylor Kitsch is horribly miscast as one of the coolest mutants out there (Gambit).

There are one or two completely unnecessary and bizarre continuity errors with the other films in the franchise too – nothing significant, but still puzzling (why not make the Adamantium tank look exactly the same as the set from X2? No reason at all, no matter what’s argued in the special features).

In the end, it’s by far a more satisfying film than Brett Ratner’s X3, and Wolverine’s not nearly as bad as everyone said at the time. It’s just that, yet again, the studios have brought out a film which on paper had all the ingredients to be good, and they’ve made it too complicated, with a rubbish story. Talk of a Wolverine 2: Wolvie goes to Japan movie is rife right now. If they do it, I hope they slow things down a bit and give the whole thing more room to breathe. Hugh Jackman can hold his head up high when he looks back on this one though. He’s still the best Wolverine we’ll ever see on screen.

And yes, Patrick Stewart does have a cameo. But I’m afraid he has the special age technology weirdness applied to his face again, just like at the start of X3, so it could have been a waxwork and we wouldn’t have noticed.

Special features: alternative Japanese bar scene, deleted scenes with intro by director Gavin Hood, Wolverine Unleashed: The Complete Origins.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is out now on DVD and Blu-ray via Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment

By Adrian Hieatt