Very few trilogies can lay claim to being unanimously praised from beginning to end, especially in the superhero genre, but few have proven to be as wildly variable across the board as Hugh Jackman’s standalone trio, with The Wolverine endemic of its issues as a whole.
Everyone – including star Ryan Reynolds – knows that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a terrible way to give one of the genre’s biggest-ever icons their first solo movie, and it deservedly holds a reputation as a dismal misfire a decade and a half on from its release.
James Mangold was an inspired choice of director for the follow-up, but despite starting strongly and convincing everyone this was the Wolverine adventure we’d been waiting for, the third act went completely off the rails and devolved into the standard CGI overload that shoehorned in a poorly-rendered pixelated villain for the umpteenth time for little rhyme or reason other than “because comic books.”
The Wolverine is good, make no mistake about that, but it could – and really should – have been great. Thankfully, Mangold and Jackman learned from those mistakes and delivered one of the greatest of all-time in Logan, with the middle chapter serving as a hint of what was to come.
Comfortably being the second-best of the triptych is hardly an accolade worth screaming about, but streaming subscribers have been willing to give it the time of day. Per FlixPatrol, The Wolverine can currently be found as one of the top-ranked titles on Google Play, so at least we can sleep easy knowing people aren’t revisiting Origins instead.