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Hugh Jackman’s stint playing James Howlett, aka Logan, aka Wolverine, has weathered seventeen years and appearances in nine films. Jackman’s popularity in the role has survived in spite of the fact that several of those entries run the gamut from weak to really bad. His stature in the cinematic X-Men universe initially gained traction because he contrasted his companions so vividly, an unkempt, hairy, spiky outsider and instinctual creature, opposing the noble clannishness of the X-Men crew, captained by the paralysed yet sagastic Charles “Professor X” Xavier (Patrick Stewart) but defined by its inclusiveness, its teeming population open to all manner of perversity, the notion of the safe space rendered as a sociological paradigm. The tension between the one and the all in X-Men is this fictional creation’s defining trait. Although it was arguably the female characters like Storm, Rogue, and Jean Grey who genuinely dominated and powered the storylines of the early and far superior films in the cycle, and Xavier and Magneto who shunted it along on a rhetorical level, it’s the Wolverine who became the icon, for his gruff, cynical brand of heroism, his encapsulation of an old-fashioned ideal of masculinity uneasily negotiating his way in a modern world either outright hostile or comically anodyne. Logan gained his own spin-off series of movies, kicking off with the downright awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and continuing through the lumpy, pseudo-serious The Wolverine (2013).
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