Hear me out before you decide to lynch me – NO ONE was more pumped to hear that Wolverine was part of the line-up when the first X-Men movie was being talked about. “FINALLY,” I though, “the Man is going to get his due and proper on the silver screen!” Admittedly, I was a little surprised at the casting of Hugh Jackman for the part – a old-school theater song-and-dance man would not have been my first choice, but aside from the height factor (which has been discussed to DEATH on numerous other threads), the man had potential. So I waited…
And while the four films so far HAVE NOT meet my expectations as an X-fan, Mr. Jackman’s overall performance has been commendable, save for one area – FIGHTING! In the original source material, Wolverine is an uber-killer-assassin trained in many tasty forms of inflicting pain. In the movies however, his ‘fighting style’ (if you can call it that) resembles more of a drunken redneck! Gone is the economy of motion. Done away with are the stylized moves and lighting-fast blows of a trained killer, and in their place the repetitive ‘hack-slash-thrust’ of a bar-room brawler are substituted. The surgical instrument has been replaced with a baseball bat!
Nowhere is this more PAINFULLY evident that in the film ‘X-Men 2: X-Men United’ in the fight scene between Wolverine and Lady Deathstrike. Both characters are products of Col. William Striker’s Weapon X program, with similar abilities and skill sets (SUPPOSEDLY), yet Deathstrike EASILY wipes the floor with Wolverine - it’s only by a stroke of luck that Logan is able to survive! Had this been more ACCURATE fight scene, we would have been privy to an epic battle of gods, pitting two HIGHLY SKILLED warriors against one another (and would have given director Bryan Singer a more plausible reason to destroy the dam, as those two would have LITERALLY brought the place down around them in the heat of battle!).
Now there have been two main arguments presented by many in this community as to why the movie Logan doesn’t necessarily need martial arts skills – his adamantium claws and his healing factor. First off, ‘YES’, his claws are super-effective weapons (duh!). ‘Yes’, they can cut through just about anything like hot steel through butter. But I pose this question to you nay-sayers – “Which is MORE dangerous, an ‘average joe’ with a blade, or the guy who’s TRAINED and KNOWS how to use one?” Even when Logan had bone claws, don’t you think he’d want to figure out the BEST (most effective) way to used them? And don’t you think that would extend to the rest of his body as a fighting instrument? Even if he didn’t travel to the Orient until AFTER the Weapon X program (as the movies elude to… which in my opinion is TOTAL BS!), there are still WESTERN forms of ‘martial arts’ that Logan would have been exposed to in all his travels – boxing, wrestling, fencing, savate (to name a few). After all the decades (centuries?) of his existence, don’t you think he’d pick up a thing or two (or a few hundred) he would incorporate into his fighting repertoire? It’s only logical! ‘Hack-slash-thrust’ only gets you so far for so long….
As for his healing factor, it has been argued that because of it he can ‘suck it up and keep on fighting’. True, his healing factor gives him an INCREDIBLE constitution, but… (and this is MY point) HE STILL FEELS IT! Even a rabid animal will avoid pain if it can! Why would Logan go blindly charging on if he can avoid a cut through a dodge or weave? He’s got the reaction time. Yes, there are times when he does ‘red-line’ and goes totally berserker in the comics, killing just about anything and everything in his path with a total disregard for himself, but those instances are rare and he has to be in a certain mindset. Speaking of which, that is another thing we haven’t seen in the films, even though it’s been hinted at countless times in the films – but that’s another article…
Now that Fox and Friends is gearing up for ‘The Wolverine’, I’ve seeing articles on how HUGE Mr. Jackman is getting, how much he can bench, and how much dead animal protein he’s consuming on a daily basis. Now the picture IS impressive – Jackman is packing on the pounds and more PHYSICALLY resembling the Kanuckle-head every day. But what about the FIGHTING aspects? ‘The Wolverine’ is supposedly talking place in Japan (and HOPEFULLY taking its cues from Frank Miller’s EPIC mini-series), yet there is no talk of Jackman hitting the dojo/kwoon. When Keanu Reeves and company were gearing up for the first ‘Martix’, they worked out eight hours a day for six months straight! Reeves said he was so sore from the training that he literally had to soak in a tub of ice water nightly to recover!
Are we in for the “same old, same old” with this new film in terms of Logan’s fighting abilities, or will we FINALLY get the Wolverine of the comic books? Only time will tell. I for one am getting tired of this misrepresentation of a beloved character. Hey Fox - get it right or give it up!