Wolverine : 2 out of 5 starsSo, I read film crit hulks 38,000 word screenwriting article, and now I'm like a carpenter with a shiny new hammer just looking for something worth pounding.
And then I watched XMen Origins – Wolverine. It was like a gift from the heavens, really, because the movie is so very bad, mostly due to script problems.(By the way spoilers abound, but a) this movie is a like 5 years old and b) it's really bad, so don't worry about it.)
Paraphrasing Film Crit Hulk, the most important aspect of screenwriting is that the elements of your screenplay (plot, characters, dialogue) serve to amplify and address your theme.
Near as I can tell the theme of Wolverine is "revenge is bad." This is a perfectly fine theme, and certainly one that shows up frequently in comic book movies (including, to a certain extent in the far superior XMen First class). The problem is in how the theme is presented. We're supposed to come to the conclusion that revenge is bad when we discover that Wolverine's girlfriend isn't dead at all, that she faked her death to get Logan to volunteer for the Adamantium treatment. However, the effect that this actually has in the context of the movie is that all of a sudden the primary villain (Sabertooth) is no longer a villain at all, the secondary villain (Stryker) becomes the primary villain, and since he isn't really a fighter we have to introduce yet a third villain (Deadpool, wait, WHAT!?) to deliver the "satisfying" high action finale.
But this doesn't make any sense. We have no reason to dislike Deadpool, and even if Sabertooth didn't do the VERY BAD thing of killing Silver Fox (Logan's girlfriend) he's still done plenty of just regular bad things (killing villagers, killing more villagers, killing the nice British lightbulb mutant, killing the nice teleporting cowboy mutant). So we can't really root for him, and we can't really root against Deadpool Logan no longer has any reason to be pissed off, so we don't really understand why we're still having this big fight.
This is worth emphasizing because what I felt in the final act of this movie was confusion and anxiety, and that's not really appropriate for fun, escapist superhero movie. Because you know how we had a primary villain and a secondary villain? Well, up until this point in the movie, we've been given reason after reason to dislike them, not just the "killed Wolverine's girlfriend" twist. Realizing that she's still alive doesn't really change the fact that the movie has been making us hate Sabertooth and Striker for the last 90 minutes and so the fact that Wolverine now has to reason (and commensurately no ability) to enact revenge, doesn't change the fact that the audience wants an emotional release. Having the only person we're still allowed to really hate just wander off and get arrested doesn't provide that.*
Furthermore, yet another serious problem with the movie is that when you're main character can heal any would within seconds, the only meaningful wounds he can take are psychological. Having the movie end with him losing his memory destroys even that. It's like the polar opposite of a tragedy. The failings of the hero cost him....absolutely nothing.
Adding to the problem is the utter lack of sensible dialogue. For example, at the end of the film, Silver Fox hypnotizes Stryker, but rather than having him kill himself, forces him to walk away saying "I should have you kill yourself, but then I'd be just like you." Well, not really, Stryker kills anyone that gets in his way, sure, but his malevolence is in his hatred of mutants, and his hypocritical manipulation and use of them. Having Silver Fox kill him would be a kindness (for the world, for Stryker himself, and most importantly, the audience).
Likewise, Wolverine himself can't seem to decide whether he's a animal or not. Throughout the "wolverine is living the dream as a lumberjack" portion of the movie he has to remind everyone that he's a mean mean person, when, really, he's not. If he was we wouldn't feel so badly for him when he girlfriend is killed and he's forced to go on a rampage.
There are a bunch of other things wrong with the movie, of course. Gambit serves no purpose in the movie whatsoever. And I can hardly imagine an actor with a worse southern accent. Continuity errors (just within the films, I'm not that much of a comic book nerd) abound, particularly between this and XMen First Class. But the biggest of my minor complaints is that the tone is wrong. All of the other XMen movies were fun comic book romps, sure, but were grounded in a sort of physical realism. In this movie, people are batted across the room as if they were in a Sam Raimi movie. If only this movie were that good.
*This is another thing that X-Men First Class did fantastically well. Sigh.
