9 / 10
Official trailer
This is a film I return to. The consensus on it is wrong in an interesting way. The received opinion is that explaining Wolverine ruined him. I think the opposite happened. The origin material in this film is the best sustained treatment the character has received on film, and it works because it refuses to make him sympathetic first.
Logan is presented as a man who has been killing for a hundred and fifty years and has developed the habits you’d expect. The film justifies his eventual refusal by showing what he’s refusing. Then, in the last stretch, it hands the ending to a character it has no idea what to do with, and that’s the part I skip.
Why Does the Origin Material Work?
Because it starts with the wrong emotion. The 1845 opening has a sick boy in a bed, a killing in the next room, and bone claws coming out of a child’s hands, and the film plays the sequence as horror instead of as awakening. Nothing about it suggests a hero is being born. A frightened boy discovers he’s dangerous and runs into the snow with the only person who will go with him.
The montage that follows is the strongest three minutes in the X-Men films.
Logan and Victor fight through the Civil War, both World Wars, and Vietnam, aging out of every uniform they wear while the world around them changes and they don’t. Most origin stories give you a single formative event. This one gives you a century of them and lets them add up. By the time the film reaches the present, you understand a man shaped by having done this too many times to count.
That montage is the stretch I’d show anyone who thinks this film is junk. It covers a century in three minutes, it’s cut so every war feels like the same war, and I love that it never stops to explain itself. The firing squad scene closes the argument. Logan and Victor stand against a wall, take a full volley, and get back up while the soldiers stare. The immortality is presented as the reason nobody can put either of them down, including themselves.
For Writers
The reason this origin lands is that it establishes the brother before it establishes the hero. Victor Creed is the version of Logan who never developed a limit, and every scene between them is an argument about whether the limit is real. That gives the backstory a present-tense function: you’re not watching history, you’re watching a man decide he’s not his brother. Compare this to origin writing that simply sequences events, childhood, trauma, training, first mission, each one explaining the next. Sequence isn’t drama. Contrast is.
If you’re writing a character’s past, find the person who took the other road from the same starting point and put them in the room. The past becomes an active pressure the moment it’s standing across from your protagonist and disagreeing with him.
Liev Schreiber Is the Reason the Film Holds
Schreiber plays Victor Creed as a man entirely at peace with what he is.
That’s far more unsettling than rage would be. He’s not a monster who has lost control. He’s someone who considered the question and decided he liked the answer. The performance carries an affection for Logan that never disappears, even in the fights, and that affection makes the relationship land.
Schreiber is my favorite thing in the film. His calm scares me more than any of the fighting, because Victor is having a fine time being what he is and he still clearly loves his brother. I’d happily have watched a whole film built around him. The two of them share a dynamic that the film understands: Victor thinks Logan is pretending, and Logan can’t entirely prove him wrong. Every confrontation runs on that unresolved question. When Victor tells him they’re the same, the film doesn’t rush to contradict it.
Hugh Jackman is doing physical work here that the ensemble films never gave him room for. The character is the center of the frame for the entire running time instead of the most interesting person in a crowded one, and Jackman fills it. The barn scene after Kayla, where he screams at the sky, is a big swing that a lesser actor would have made ridiculous.
The Adamantium Procedure and What Follows
The procedure sequence is the film’s set piece and it’s staged with real cruelty. Logan volunteers. That detail matters, and it’s the inversion the film builds toward: the thing done to him in X2 as an atrocity is, here, something he asked for to kill his brother. The tank, the bone saw whine of the machinery, the moment his heart stops on the monitors, and Stryker deciding right then to wipe his memory because a weapon that remembers is a weapon that leaves.
Danny Huston plays Stryker as an administrator, the right tone. He’s not sadistic. He’s a man managing an asset portfolio, and the coldness of that framing does more damage than menace would. Brian Cox played the same character with more conviction in X2 and Huston plays him with more paperwork, and the two versions sit together without conflict.
What follows the procedure is the film’s best action stretch. The escape from the facility, the farmhouse with the elderly couple, the helicopter, the motorcycle run through the streets. It moves, it’s legible, and Logan is recognizably the character from the first three films for the first time in the running time.
The Deadpool Problem, and the Fast Forward
Ryan Reynolds is very good in the first act. Wade Wilson talks continuously, kills with a precision that makes the sword work legitimately impressive, and treats the whole operation as material. It’s the character, and it’s the performance Reynolds would spend the next seven years fighting to do properly.
I think Reynolds is the best thing in the first act, and those scenes are exactly why the later choice is such a blunder. The film had the right actor, the right mouth and the right attitude in hand, and then it threw all three away for a mute knockoff.
Then the film takes his mouth. Weapon XI is a mute composite with retractable arm blades, optic beams, and teleportation, played in the final sequence by Scott Adkins with Reynolds’s face on it.
The film presents a character whose entire function is speech as one who can’t speak. The Three Mile Island climax that follows is disconnected from everything the film has been doing for eighty minutes, and it exists to service a franchise plan that never happened.
So I skip it. On rewatch the film ends for me around the island facility, and what I’ve watched is a complete story about two brothers, a betrayal, and a man who chose the metal. The material I fast forward past is a small fraction of the running time. That ratio is why the rating is a 9 instead of a 5.
Craft: An Origin That Commits
Craft Note
The Kayla betrayal is the structural decision most people undervalue. Logan’s motivation across the second act is grief over a woman who’s alive and working for Stryker, and the film lets the audience sit inside a false motive with him. When the reversal arrives it doesn’t cancel the grief, because the relationship was real on her side too. Reversals that invalidate everything preceding them are cheap. Reversals that recontextualize without erasing are the expensive kind, and this one is the expensive kind.
The film also understands that a character defined by regeneration needs a cost that regeneration can’t fix. Physical damage means nothing to Logan, so the story routes every real wound through memory and through Victor. The final loss is being made to forget the only thing he had. That’s the correct instinct for writing an invulnerable protagonist: locate the one thing the power doesn’t protect, and aim everything at it.
The 9 reflects a film I rewatch, with a documented skip.
The production history was ugly, the workprint leaked a month early with wire rigs visible, and both shaped the reception. None of that is in the finished frames of the first eighty minutes. The Weapon XI decision is a real failure and it’s contained enough to route around.
Is X-Men Origins: Wolverine as good as people say?
A 9. X-Men Origins: Wolverine handles the origin better than its reputation allows, because it builds the past around a brother instead of around a sequence of events. Liev Schreiber gives Victor Creed an affection that survives every fight and makes the relationship the spine of the film. Hugh Jackman finally gets the frame to himself and fills it. The adamantium procedure inverts X2 by making it something Logan volunteers for. Danny Huston plays Stryker as an administrator managing assets. That’s colder than menace. The Kayla reversal recontextualizes the second act without invalidating it.
The Weapon XI material is the film’s one real failure, and it’s a large one. Removing a talking character’s mouth is the kind of decision that gets studied. It also arrives late, occupies a contained stretch of the running time, and you can skip it without damaging the story that precedes it. I skip it. What remains is the best pure Wolverine film until Logan (2017).
