Picture a man and woman driving in the snow. There is no underlying sexual tension, no cheeky banter to kill the quiet of the scene. The woman is a young woman in her teens, slipping her hands out of the leather gloves she had been wearing religiously up to this point to dig into a chocolate bar. Her driver is a man—seemingly in his late twenties—the typical rough-around-the-edges type. The only sound is the cruising of tires and the rumbling of a rusting engine. He takes a cigar out of his mouth, resting his hand on the steering wheel.
The woman glances over at his hands. The music begins to swell in low and mysterious tones.
“When they come out…does it hurt?” she asks, her southern drawl colored by indecision as she glances back at him. Her driver simply stares ahead through the snow trickling down on the windshield, a look of quiet acceptance on his face as the camera pans to him. He opens his mouth and responds to the question that would cement his legacy.
“Every time.”
Superheroes are all the rage now. The average channel surfer can’t go through more than three commercials without their screens glowing with energy blasts and pose-striking superheroes. After years of superhero movies dominating the market, filmgoers are feeling more than a little fatigued. Despite the odds and the myriad of other superhero stinkers coloring the market lately, one of the most talked about commercials during this year’s Super Bowl still managed to generate a great deal of hype. It sought to capture audience interest by promising the return of one of cinema’s longest lasting and celebrated superhero portrayals: Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.
In fact, after only twenty-four hours, the trailer for“Deadpool & Wolverine” broke the record for the most viewed trailer of all time. Good job, Marvel?
So what’s the deal with all of the hype? What made Hugh Jackman’s portrayal as the immortal mutant of the X-Men such that it is cutting through the fog of superhero fatigue, and how is the pairing of such a brooding anti-hero with a character as off-the-walls as Deadpool generating this amount of hype in the fandom?
The answer is simple: Wolverine brought heart to superhero movies and Marvel is looking to make that heart beat again.
Think back to a time where superhero movies weren’t all too popular.. Two years before Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man ” would soar onto the big screen, emotional depth was a rarity in superhero movies (as was quality). Even the rare standout for Marvel that practically jump-started the superhero trend, Wesley Snipes’ “Blade,”was more so a “Matrix” pastiche action-fueled adrenaline rush rather than one that allowed for moments of quiet characterization.
That was until the release of “X-Men” in 2000, the superhero genre coming out swinging in the new millennium with Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of Wolverine. He brought heart and a level of quiet introspection to a character that most would just expect to fire off one-liners as he diced apart the bad guys. Chris Claremont—the writer who had revised Wolverine’s character in the 1970s—outright stood up from his seat and applauded at the premiere when he what was being done with one of the characters he helped flesh out. It was the story of a man haunted by a past that he could only remember in brief flashes, his briefest memory being him stumbling out of a cold and unfeeling tunnel, claws protruding from his hands, and the agony of his lungs from hours of screaming.
Come the arrival of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was a general consensus that the stylistic changes in Joss Whedon’s “Avengers” did the genre a massive favor when it steered away from melancholy in favor of a more lighthearted tone. Nowadays the overly snarky tone takes away just as much as it adds, sawing the tops off the emotional highs and putting padding on the emotional lows of these stories by outright killing the tone with an ill-placed joke.
One moment the heroes are dealing with the ramifications of their failure to stop a villain from wiping out half of the life in the universe. The very next, they intersperse it with a scene showing Thor getting drunk and heckling kids over “Fortnite.” There is a tonal whiplash, going from watching characters struggle in therapy sessions over the trauma of knowing they failed to such an astronomical degree to the low-hanging-fruit of comedy, and it kills how an audience is supposed to feel about the stakes in these movies. If the movie itself doesn’t seem to care about the gravity of events in a movie, then why should the audience?
Compare this with the story of Wolverine, whose moments of rare humor does not come at the expense of the trauma he’s undergone in his centuries of fighting and surviving in a world that fears and discriminates against those with powers. He found and lost love on countless occasions and was brought back from the brink of isolation only to end up being the last survivor of his generation, the one passing off the torch to the next generation of mutants. There’s no contest which type of movie tugs at the heartstrings more.
There is a rawness to Wolverine that other films fail to portray. Deadpool is able to intermingle tragedy and comedy perfectly while using him as the lynchpin of the two styles of storytelling. Marvel is clearly hoping to try and bridge the gap between these two features and—fingers crossed—bring audiences back in droves.
Not only did Hugh Jackman come out of the gate swinging, but he managed to close out his long tenure as Wolverine with an equally, if not more so, stellar ending. Whereas “X-Men” was the first successful movie centered around a team of like minded heroes, “Logan” absolutely shined in showing what happens when one strips that all away, exploring the twilight years of the aging titular character in a world with mutants in harsh decline. It redefined the emotional depths that a superhero flick could have, passing on the torch to a new generation in a story that still managed to send off its longest-running hero with a heartfelt farewell. It ended on a satisfactory note that Hugh Jackman was more than happy with, fully set on hanging up the claws until recently.
So will his return live up to the long-awaited eagerness that fans have held for the next chapter of The X-Men? We will have to wait with bated breath to see him done justice when he unsheathes his claws once more in July.
