Written by: Tony Lazlo, CC2K Staff Writer

---

Let’s call this another entry in the Cease and Desist series. Here’s an old script review I wrote for X-Men: Origins: Wolverine.

In a few short paragraphs, David Benioff convinced me that the best way to make a movie about Marvel’s iconic antihero Wolverine would be to remake Ted Kotcheff’s classic First Blood and give Logan about 90 minutes of microbudget cat-and-mouse action in the snowy backwoods of Canada. 

But I grant that the demands of studios and fanboys require anyone writing or producing a Wolverine movie to deliver something with some scope. Benioff’s script delivers both the intimate microbudget action movie and the epic superhero flick, but with mixed results. The missteps that contribute to my mixed opinion happen mostly in a meandering second act and are by no means fatal. In fact, Benioff’s second act is so random and modular, you could substitute virtually anything and get a better script — and perhaps even a great movie.

Be advised that this script review is packed to the fucking gills with spoilers! Let’s go act by act.

Act one: Logan’s first blood

Not surprisingly, Benioff’s script acts as a direct prequel to the events seen in the three X-Men movies. Disclosure: I’m only a passing fan of the X-Men and Wolverine comics, and I know nothing about the actual mythology surrounding Logan, and I haven’t read up on it for this review — I wanted to come into this one with a totally open mind.

The story opens with a dandy flashback to a child-age Logan tearing apart some bullying jocks in the woods, and then drops us in Bumblefuck, Canada, where he apparently spends all his time brooding, chewing cigars and chopping wood (the script shows him chopping wood at home and at his lumberjacking job).

While Logan is chopping wood, Col. Stryker (last seen as Gen. Stryker in X-Men 2) approaches, accompanied by a mysterious scary guy named Agent Zero. Stryker asks Logan to come back to the military and help out with a top-secret government black-op mission. An annoyed (yet troubled) Logan says he’s through killing for Uncle Sam. Stryker and Agent Zero leave — or do they?

Meanwhile, Victor Creed (Sabretooth) tromps around rural Canada killing mutants.

So far, so good. Benioff invokes one of those hoary action movies clichés that I still find charming: the old general asking his best soldier to come out of retirement for one last mission. It’s Joseph Campbell’s call to adventure dressed in camouflage fatigues, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the rustic locales that those heroes retreat to when they want to escape their pasts — I love ’em all, from John Matrix’s woodsy cabin in Commando to the monastery John Rambo hides in at the start of Rambo III.

But even better is Benioff’s simple choice to include Stryker and Sabretooth. Stryker was the most memorable new character to emerge from Bryan Singer’s masterful X-Men 2, while Sabretooth was the least successful villain in the original movie. I want to see Stryker again simply because I want to see more great work from one of the most underrated classical actors working today: Brian Cox, who I say would have made a better Hannibal Lecter.

And damn if I don’t want to give Tyler Mane another crack at Sabretooth. Mane is a big, lumbering goofbrain, but he put his fucking back into his performance as Ajax (a big, lumbering goofbrain himself) in Wolfgang Petersen’s big-screen Iliad, Troy (another Benioff script, incidentally). Mane’s Sabretooth was about as intimidating as the lead guitarist in this band, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and blame his bungled performance on poor character design.

Moving on: Oh, so Logan has a love interest named Kayla, who is totally not doomed to die at Sabretooth’s hands so Logan has a reason to seek revenge. OK, I’m kidding: Sabretooth kicks Logan’s ass and kills her, but before that happens, Benioff gives us a beautiful little scene where Kayla recounts an old myth about why the moon is so lonely. Apparently the moon used to have a lover named Kuekuatsheu, but sadly a trickster spirit fooled Kuekuatsheu into thinking that the moon was unfaithful. It turns out that “kuekuatsheu” means “wolverine.”

Kayla doesn’t tell this story for any other reason than to add melancholy to the story, but it’s a nice try. One of the fun challenges that faces every screenwriter who adapts a comic for the screen is the need to justify the hero’s goofy nickname. Very few heroes can get away with the rooftop declaration of their superheroic moniker (Superman and Batman spring to mind), but for the rest of the plebes, they need a real reason to call themselves Captain FuckingAmazing or The AzzKickor or Sporkman. X-Men 2 still has my favorite superhero name justification ever — the societal outcast mutants take on their nicknames out of despair, defiance and pride — and Benioff comes up with a pretty damn good justification for Logan’s ferocious codename, which I’ll get to later.

Back to the story. So Sabretooth kills Kayla, and Logan contacts Stryker so he can get involved in the super-secret black-op mission, which turns out to be a top-secret experiment to build a perfect soldier out of adamantium. That’s right: Logan gets his bones gilded with supermetal to exact revenge on Sabretooth.

Keeping in mind that I know nothing about the actual comic book storyline surrounding Logan’s super-skeleton, I applaud this choice. Logan’s nightmarish flashbacks to his adamantium surgery unmistakably suggested that the government abducted him and forced him to have the procedure. I like that Logan volunteers for it not only because it’s a nice twist, but also because it put Logan at the opposite end of the same soldier-government continuum that includes another successful experiment: Steve Rogers, aka Captain America. I like that the government turned the Polio-stricken Rogers into a patriotic super-soldier during World War II, but that they later took an alienated foreigner and turned him into a gruff antihero in the post-Vietnam era. Both experiments work, but the results mirror the times. Intentional or not, it’s a nice symmetry.

We see the adamantium operation, and as soon as he’s able, Logan busts out of Stryker’s underground lair and goes after Sabretooth, but not before the aforementioned cat-and-mouse homage to First Blood through and among the snowy pines and firs of Canada. There’s a lot to admire in this sequence — some good hand-to-hand fights, a confrontation with a pack of wolves — but I’m content to say that I wish this were the whole movie.

Also note that the adamantium surgery does not wipe out Logan’s memory — but more on that later.

Act two: Fanboy mayhem

After Logan eludes Stryker’s soldiers in the woods, holes up in some old guy’s house, gets them killed by mistake and takes their motorcycle. It’s a good scene, but right after it, the movie short-circuits. Logan has to find Sabretooth, right? So for an act, Benioff’s script turns into a mini-detective movie. Logan shakes some trees for intel on Sabretooth’s whereabouts and winds up in Las Vegas, where he has a battle-royale-with-cheese with Marvel Comics deep cut The Blob. Later he visits a nightclub for mutants. It’s not a terrible scene, but in the post-Buffy, post-Lost Boys, post-Blade pop-culture landscape, we’ve seen too many ultra-hip, ultra-gritty underground clubs for sci-fi and fantasy freaks and outcasts. (Shit, I’m surprised Peter Jackson didn’t shoehorn one into the Lord of the Rings movies. Oh, wait — the Paths of the Dead kind of fulfilled that purpose. Just kidding.)

During all this randomness, Logan gets in a few fights and finds out that Sabretooth was in cahoots with Stryker all along and is hiding in the same underground fortress where Logan had the adamantium bonded to his skeleton. Logan high-tails it back to Canada, and we buzz right into …

Act three: Yet another prequel that’s better than Revenge of the Sith

Can you see what I mean by the second act being modular? All that needs to happen during the second act is for Logan to figure out Sabretooth’s involvement with Stryker. Just about anything could happen to facilitate that, and before I launch into my analysis of act three, I’ll offer these suggestions:

1. Logan teams up with a mutant who fills some kind of detective role in the story. There’s a character who sort of fulfills this purpose (Hines), but I have in mind a more full-bodied gumshoe character to team up with Logan.

2. Logan tracks Stryker and confronts him. (I sort of like this idea because it would bring a Parallax View style of paranoid storytelling to the narrative — a nice match with the First Blood-y first act.)

3. Logan learns the true meaning of Christmas (just kidding).

In any event, act three starts off with Logan returning to Stryker’s remote fortress, where the renegade colonel and his staff of scary black-op scientists are building an army of Sabretooths — 10,000 to be exact.

More important, though, Logan finds out that Kayla is still alive — and she’s a mutant. The twist, though, is that she’s not alive because of her mutant power, but because she betrayed Logan. It turns out she was in league with Stryker, too, and that she used her mutant power (mind control) to get Logan to fall in love with her. That way, Stryker would have someone to kill that Logan would actually avenge.

OK, there’s a lot to talk about here, so let’s go point by point:

• Because this prequel is about Logan’s backstory, we know he’ll lose his memory. Any X-Men fan knows that a murky past and a largely blank long-term memory are staples of the Logan myth, so we know that this movie will explain how Logan lost his memory. In the case of this movie, we learn that Logan’s healing powers will also regenerate brain tissue, meaning that a well-aimed armor piercing bullet could penetrate Logan’s adamantium-reinforced skull and wipe out his memory center. OK, I don’t entirely buy that, but I like that they gave the Stryker character the choice to wipe out Logan’s memory. Naturally, Stryker wants to do this to get Logan fully involved in his super-soldier program.

• Because we know that Logan is going to get his memory wiped, we’re pretty sure this movie will have a sad ending. Remember Kayla’s sad fairy tale about the moon, the trickster and the hapless wolverine? That sad tale turned out to be a grim tone-setter for the whole movie. The Logan character has come to remind me of that great Patriot-Act-enabling superagent, Jack Bauer, who over the course of Fox’s magnificent gimmick drama 24 has become a perfect existential hero. He’s lost his name, his family, his loves, his freedom — hell, at some points in the series, he even loses his job, which leaves him with nothing but his name. Season six of 24 went off the rails toward the end, but I admired its self-aware ending, with Jack staring out at the nighttime ocean surf, his dead eyes aglow with the inescapable knowledge that all he can do is kill for a government that won’t let him stop. Logan faces a similar predicament, except he has a little more luck escaping his fate, though the price for his freedom at the end of this movie is his memory.

In fact, let’s talk about memory. By choosing to make Kayla a plant who gets Logan to fall in love with her, Benioff indirectly invokes Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, in which Sharon Stone’s character plays the role of happy wife to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s memory-altered hero.

But as opposed to Verhoeven, who had the good sense to make Stone a relentless mercenary whom Arnold executes, Benioff makes Kayla go native — she falls in love with Logan, or rather, she fell in love with him during their time together. In an unrelentingly sad story — the movie ends with her death and Logan’s memory loss at the hands of Stryker — Kayla’s love is a small shred of unexpected joy for Logan. Good call.

The action-packed isn’t what interests me in this story. Yeah, yeah — Logan and Kayla destroy the base and all but one of the Sabretooth clones. It’s fun stuff, but the really satisfying scene comes at the end, when Stryker confronts the two lovebirds as they make their escape and shoots them both.

Remember earlier when I talked about the grand tradition of justifying superhero names? Get this: Stryker shoots Kayla and Logan. Logan falls unconscious as his brain regenerates, while Kayla, with her dying breaths, controls Stryker’s mind and instructs him to take a long walk off a short continent. As she bleeds out, she finds a scrap of paper and scribbles a few words on it. Logan wakes up to find a dead woman in his lap and a scrap of paper in his hand.

It reads, “You are my wolverine.”

I’m totally the kind of goof who gets misty-eyed during the carbon-freezing scene in The Empire Strikes Back, and as the cab driver would say in Scrooged, that ending image was “Niagra Falls” for my eyes. It’s a great ending for an imperfect script that just needs a little bit of love to be a great script.