Sequel presents kinder, gentler Wolverine

By Frank Lovece

Newsday

NEW YORK

In a way, Roger Ebert helped make “The Wolverine.”

“Why should I care about this guy?” the film critic asked in his review of 2009’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the previous film starring Hugh Jackman as Marvel Comics’ mutant hero with metal claws and a rapid self-healing ability. “He feels no pain and nothing can kill him,” Ebert said, “so therefore he’s essentially a story device for action sequences.”

Director James Mangold (“Girl, Interrupted”) took that to heart when prepping “The Wolverine,” opening Friday as a sequel to that previous film and to the three “X-Men” movies made between 2000 and 2006.

“Roger is a hero of mine, as well as a real supporter and a good friend over the years,” Mangold says in a telephone interview. “He communicated with me, and I remember what he said about the first film. I think what he said was dead-on.”

And so in this new film, in which Logan (aka Wolverine) goes to Japan to honor a dying man’s last request, Mangold and his screenwriters removed most of that healing ability, courtesy of a villainous-mutant doctor (Svetlana Khodchenkova) and an aged technology titan (Hal Yamanouchi) who covets it. If you prick him, this Wolverine bleeds. And bleeds. And bleeds.

“If you have a hero who can’t be hurt, there’s only one way to create stakes or jeopardy, and that’s to put people he cares about in harm’s way,” Mangold observes. “And, not unlike the amnesia thing, that can get tired really fast.”

By “the amnesia thing,” Mangold’s referring to a trope in initial screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie’s early script — eventually revised by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank — in which Wolverine, suffering from memory loss, visits Japan in search of answers to his past. Aside from anything else, that was chronologically problematic: While the character did lose his memory at the end of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the events of that film take place before the events of the “X-Men” trilogy.

And besides, Mangold says, “I’m just tired of amnesia. I mean, characters who can’t remember anything? There have been some excellent films about characters who can’t remember who they are, but usually it’s just a puzzle film. That’s not my style, and I think there’s so much to mine in Logan without robbing him of self-knowledge.”

For one thing, there’s his apparent immortality. [Although he does age, albeit slowly, in the comics, the movie characters might not yet realize this.] “What I wanted to present to the audience,” Mangold says, “was, what is it like to feel a prisoner in a life you cannot escape? You accumulate pain and loss, and keep that with you as you keep on going.”

Not unlike the endless struggle to bring this movie to screen. It was back in October 2010 that 20th Century Fox confirmed Darren Aronofsky, fresh off “Black Swan,” as director. But he left the project five months later, saying he preferred not to be out of the country for “almost a year” working on the film, the bulk of which was eventually shot in Australia.

Fox spent two months narrowing his replacement to eight directors before choosing Mangold in June 2011. Production, which had been set to begin March 2011, got pushed to October and then November. It finally commenced July 30, 2012, and wrapped in November.