8 Reasons Wolverine Is The Most Disappointing Part Of X-Men: Apocalypse

Across the franchise, the X-Men movies have managed to adapt most key elements of Wolverine's character (except the height, but we don't talk about that anymore): a loner, an amnesiac, a leader, a war hero, a mercenary, an experiment, a loner in Japan, a war hero again.

The one thing we haven't got is a proper show of Weapon X or the berserker rage (and Old Man Logan, but that's coming); he's always had very sanitised freak-outs and because he was the typical protagonist in Origins: Wolverine the transformation didn't quite gel.

Singer attempts to put that right by giving us a wholly feral Wolverine without a hint of his past or future humanity, which on movie number eight feels rather reductive. To criticise a single X-Man for poor characterisation in Apocalypse is a little unfair - across the board the handling of the mutants is very poor, with no one really rising above the restrictive screenplay - but with Wolverine, who doesn't even get an arc, it's particularly important.

The only real purpose for Wolverine here is to give Hugh Jackman a chance to play the "berserker rage" before he hangs up the claws; it's completionist, and because it's so box ticky there's nothing more to it. Although that may be because of a bigger conceptual problem...