Being a loooong time comic fan (25+ years) I was looking forward to a Wolverine solo movie for a long time. I’ve read the limited series and most of the origin stories and have followed Wolverine over the years. My biggest hope was that they movie studio and writers could get most of the ‘nitty-gritty’ details of Wolverine’s past worked into the script. For the most part they did. But they obviously took some liberties with some areas. I had no doubt that Hugh Jackman could pull off a convincing Wolverine. He did it in the original three X-Men movies much to my satisfaction. I must say, though, at first I was a doubter when he was announced as the actor who would play this iconic comic book character. I mean, Jackman’s about 6 ft tall and Wolverine is supposed to be about 5’2″. There are many references to the ‘runts’ diminuative size in the comics. But Jackman made it work. A testament to his acting chops.
But anyway, you see several other mutants from the comics worked into this origin flick: Gambit, Agent Zero (who I really hadn’t heard of until this movie. Maybe I missed some issues.), Deadpool (who was one of the characters I was eager to see how they worked him), a young Cyclops, a young Emma Frost (The White Queen), Blob (whose origin is just all messed up in this), John Wraith (who I really hadn’t heard of either) and, of course, Sabertooth.
Now I can be counted among the very few people who liked the Sabertooth played by wrestler Tyler Mane. I thought they played him too dumb but he had the presence. I was really skeptical of Liev Schrieber as Sabertooth because he just didn’t have the musculature or size. But I thought maybe they could work with that as they did with Hugh Jackman. Schrieber did OK in my opinion. They kept his trenchcoat on for the most part. I still would have liked to see Mane in the roll, though. I did like how they did Sabertooths claws.
The movie moved along pretty quickly as there was a lot of history that they had to work with and fit into an hour and a half (could have made it two hours and fit more things in and made it make more sense but ‘Oh, well’). One beef that I had was that they had the Weapon X program in America instead of Canada. And Wolverine didn’t lose his memory and go feral when he got the Adamantium bonded to his skeleton. It was something Stryker said that set him off. But the end of the movie does set up how Wolverine lost his memory as was mentioned in the first X-Men movie. Also, stay till the end of the credits for a bonus scene that will lead you to see where they probably will go with a sequel. **Spoiler Alert**
(hint: Japan)
I wasn’t thrilled how things went with Deadpool but there are hints that there could be a spinoff if they can explain some pretty crucial stuff. I think Ryan Reynolds was doing a great job in the part and could have expanded it further had they let him. His character had great, unrealized, potential.
I’ll look forward to a sequel that can go further and use some more elements of the Wolverine series.