For the 11th chapter of this series, I wanted to start by asking a question: What actor has the greatest performance playing a comic book character of all time?
Christian Bale is probably the best actor to have ever played a superhero, but it’s arguable between him and Keaton as far as Batman is concerned. We all went crazy when we saw Tobey Maguire in Spider man: no way home, but most would give a healthy argument to the other two people who played Spider-man either being a better Peter Parker or a better Spider-Man. Is it one of the Jokers? No, not Jared Leto, of course, but maybe one of the other three? I mean, two of them (Joaquin Phoenix and Heath Ledger) did win Oscars for playing the Joker… but still no. One performance in one movie doesn’t make you the answer to that question, no matter how good that performance may be.
There is one clear answer to this question, and it shouldn’t be debated. One man has played his character for the past 25 years. He’s covered so many angles of this character forwards and backward that he set an impossible bar for the replacement to match in any way. Not only that, as it turns out, he’s a world-class song and danceman as well. A veteran of Broadway and a real triple threat. A man who’s hosted numerous award shows and has an Oscar nomination to boot. A true national treasure of the country of Australia…
Hugh Michael Jackman
In going over his resume to make this article, I couldn’t help but notice how enjoyable a lot of his lesser-known movies are. There is a lot of under-the-radar movies that he’s done in the last six or seven years or so, and a lot of really campy type of stuff in the mid-2000s. There are many movie stars in the game with a particular “got to cast them in the right type of thing” type of idiosyncrasies, but Jackman is not one of them. He is a true Jack of all trades. (Semi-pun not intended)
This is a man who truly has good performances in every single thing he’s ever done. But with that being said, he’s also done a lot of movies that are not integral to his cinematic legacy. Those films are:
*Someone like you
*butter
*deception
*flushed away
*Happy feet
*burning season
*movie 43
*rise of the guardians
*night at the museum part 3
*missing link
*erskineville kings
*paperback hero
*the son
*X-Men: first class
*X-Men: apocalypse
There are many good performances in there. There are also many cameos and animated movies that you wouldn’t know he was in outside of looking at the cast list on IMDb.
Anywho, without further ado, here is…
THE HUGH JACKMAN TIER LIST!!!!
🤩 GREATNESS 🤩
LOGAN
Simply put, this is a top 10 superhero film of all time. It is easily the best X-Men film, and it’s one of the greatest films of the last 15 years. It gave a close-out to this character that seems absolutely unimaginable to follow. Furthermore, I will state that Jackman’s performance in this movie is the best one he’s ever had in his movie career and one of the best overall superhero performances in the history of the genre. To this day this is the only superhero film to get an Oscar nomination for a screenplay. Not Wonder woman, the dark knight, any of the Avengers movies or Black panther. This. That should say a lot about how great this is.
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURES PAST
We really don’t give this credit like we should. There are some people who truly believe that 20th Century Fox really wanted to recreate the X-Men and never have them cross over, and there are some who found it very obvious that the whole point of the X-Men sequel quadrilogy (for lack of a better term) was to eventually have a crossover with the older cast. It’s the perfect blend of everything I feel they were always meant to do. It’s not a perfect superhero movie. There’s no all time great s*** that happened here…. But there is a lot of stuff that gets an A+ in its execution. A LOT OF STUFF.
Deadpool & Wolverine
(See review here)
PRISONERS
Anybody who does not name-check this as Denis Villeneuve’s best film, I can go ahead and assume that you’ve caught on to the bandwagon most recently. This is Jackman’s best non-Wolverine performance, without question. He goes to incredibly dark emotional depths here and was genuinely robbed of awards season as a whole. I am mystified that he did not get nominated for any major awards for this performance.
THE PRESTIGE
When doing an In Retrospect article on Christopher Nolan last year I put this film in the greatness adjacent category mistakenly. And that was because I was comparing this film to the other films in that man’s resume. To watch it again in its entirety for researching this article…boy, was that ever a mistake. This is obviously a classic and has only aged beautifully, as many Christopher Nolan movies do. This may be Nolan’s most rewatchable Non-Batman film. If you just so happen to be on a treadmill at the gym and you’re watching this movie on mute, you might do it for a little bit longer than you expected to. This is a movie with one of the more brilliant and f***** up endings of the decade it was in. Almost every Christopher Nolan movie has had dark emotional undertones, but this film is a lot more grim than you might remember.
GREATNESS ADJACENT
X-MEN
As I’ve said before, the X-Men franchise has had its fair share of cinematic disasters, and the level of badness that those movies are on really has distorted the conversation about how culturally important this movie was. One could say that if this movie had failed, we probably wouldn’t have a Batman reboot, and we most certainly wouldn’t have the MCU as it is. Somebody had to be the guinea pig. And even though blade came before this, that was rated R, that was for a particular audience. This film was the thing that restored our faith in this genre after the disasters that were the Schumacher Batman films. Jackman is doing his thing, as we all know, but this is a movie clearly carried by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and it’s all for the best. Jackman would have his moment in the sun plenty of times down the road.
X2
….. And by down the road, I mean the very next X-Men movie. This was the movie where we really saw Wolverine get his hands truly dirty. This was the first time that we really saw Wolverine kind of be the Wolverine that we know. X2 also had solid performances by Brian Cox as William Stryker, one of the most underrated superhero villains ever. It also had a delightful and badass performance from Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler. The opening scene of this film is very famous for a reason. Damn shame they didn’t use Nightcrawler as much as they could have in this series.
THE GREATEST SHOWMAN
Usually, I do think that someone’s admiration of modern-day live-action musicals can be attributed to personal bias in many different ways. I, like many people I’ve talked to who’ve seen this movie went in completely neutral. Like them, I came away very impressed with how entertaining it was. Yes, there are a lot of ballads here, but the movie is honestly fun and does take you by surprise, even if you are cynical of the whole live-action music thing as a whole. It may seem a little overpraised by some who haven’t seen it, but it is not,
😊 GOOD 😊
THE WOLVERINE
It became very clear that Fox learned their lesson from the first Wolverine flick and stopped phoning it in. This movie has very little to do with the X-Men universe when you look at it, but it kind of doesn’t matter. As a fish out of water action film, this works way more than people give it credit for. Sometimes, his superhero movies just work as action popcorn flicks and shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than that. That certainly is the case here and it shouldn’t be condemned for that.
CHAPPIE
One thing that became abundantly clear after watching this movie is that people really really hate ie Antwoord. And to an extent, I get it. Their music is very insufferable. However, both of them give really good performances in this movie, and as an action sci-fi drama, it works. This is Jackman’s best villainous performance. It’s a character who’s evil in a very outright way and flat-out dislikable…
(Outside of his mullet. Jackman pulls off a mullet very well, and that is a very, very rare thing.)
AUSTRALIA
I am far from a Baz Luhrmann fan. Not because he’s bad at his job or anything, it seems that he favors style over substance a little bit too often. I don’t think that was the case here. This is obviously a story that Luhrmann cares a lot for, and it shows more than any other movies he’s made so far. Jackman has a very Rock Hudson kind of old-school heartthrob kind of feel here and heightens what is already rock-solid material. This movie is severely underrated and very little seen because people are too sketchy of 3-hour films being in a movie theater.
SWORDFISH
If you are at all a fan of ’90s style, over-the-top, s*** crazy popcorn flick types of films, then this is for you. Everything is completely ludicrous, everything is over-stylized, and all of the dialogue is hilariously ham-fisted… and that’s okay. Once upon a time there were films that embodied all of these traits. Films like broken arrow, assassins, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT CHAIN REACTION, FACE/OFF, the list goes on and on and on. Swordfish is of that class. If you’re not a fan of that class, then I understand why you don’t like this. But I am a big fan of that class. This class is in my wheelhouse.
MEH….
LES MISERABLES
This is one of the most overrated movies of the entire decade. A film that I feel was celebrated because the stage show has always been such an iconic thing that seemed impossible to be put to screen. What this film does is no different from what any other stage musical adaptation of the film has ever done when it’s aiming to win Oscars. That being said, this is a top-five Hugh Jackman performance. If you compare how he’s singing here to how he sings in the greatest showman it is clear that he’s singing in character. Valjean singing gets more tired and weary the more this film goes on, and his voice doesn’t sound the same in the third act as it did in the first act. Quite literally, everybody else in this film is singing in a more “show my voice off” kind of way except Jackman (and maybe Eddie Redmayne, too), in my opinion. He earned that Oscar nomination for this.
EDDIE THE EAGLE
This is a very typical underdog sports film. It hits all of the familiar beats that we know for these types of movies to have, and you know what? That’s just fine. If you’re going to do something formulaic, then make it entertaining. That’s what this is. Doesn’t have a lot of appeal. The poster and the trailer were very… vanilla. But you got Taron Egerton and Hugh Jackman really being an entertaining duo. This is so much more of a movie to stream rather than two pay-to-go and see in the theater, but it is entertaining nonetheless.
VAN HELSING
This really could have been a franchise. All the makings were there. The world they built up was interesting, the humor was there, it’s a technically superior film to a lot of the stuff at the time, and Jackman and Beckinsale have really good chemistry. But it’s just that the action was really cheesy and flat-out bad. Not even subpar, but bad. It’s so strange to watch this all these years later and realize how if at best, the action really is compared to things that were out at the time.
REAL STEEL
I have a feeling that if this had come out before 2007, it would have been a bigger hit. It is very heartfelt, and it tries its best to be a sports movie. I just remember at the time that this came out that transformers had already cornered the market on CGI robot fighting movies and was probably the biggest franchise in the world at the time of this film’s release. On top of all that, the first transformers was a better movie than this is. This movie had no shot to succeed.
KATE AND LEOPOLD
This is pretty much by-the-numbers rom-com stuff. All of it is well done. All of it is stuff that we’ve seen before and since. It’s adorable. I don’t know any other way to describe this film, but adorable. That’s about as high of a compliment as you can possibly give it, though. Not bad. Very mid. Skinny Hugh Jackman is a hell of a thing to see after all this time.
THE FOUNTAIN
I personally feel that I have a love-hate relationship with Darren Aronofsky’s work. It’s all just a real roll of the dice when you break it down. Sometimes, you get flat-out masterpieces like THE WRESTLER, BLACK SWAN, or REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. And sometimes you get overly pretentious horse s*** like mother!, noah, and… this. You do have to give credit to Aronofsky for his boldness and the fact that he is probably the most fearless director in the game today. This is an overstuffed film that has so much to say about so many different things that it’s designed to make you think more than it is to give you an actual resolution. Aronofsky films usually do that without all of the pomp and circumstance. There was just too much flashy s*** here.
🤮 WTF IS THIS GARBAGE?! 🤮
X-MEN: THE LAST STAND
When one goes back to read the list of actors that are associated with this movie, one cannot help but feel that this is the greatest cast of talent ever assembled for a film (next to OCEAN’S 12 and JFK) and what is it all for?… this… REALLY? I know that because we’re used to the concept of a shared universe we tend to forget that this movie is called THE LAST STAND because this was designed to only be a trilogy. THIS REALLY WAS THE INTENDED ENDING. It’s such a steep decline in quality with a less-skilled director and a storyline that flat-out insults the audience’s intelligence. This is truly one of the most bull**** superhero movies of all time.
X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE
On one hand I think people are too harsh on this movie. Mind you, it’s bad. The film that came before this was X-Men 3, and believe it or not, this is a marked improvement simply by focusing on Wolverine in a more prominent way. Jackman has never ever ceased to be entertaining in this role, even in this. He is not the problem. The problem mainly lies in the execution of it all. This is a movie that really thinks it’s epic. It really thinks that it’s aiming higher than what it’s aiming for, and it all comes off as goofy. The action sequences look very Bollywood-ish in comparison to everything that’s come before or since. And as tentpole-ish as is trying to be, it’s not really a fun movie either. It looks like a cash grab, and it looks like there’s very little effort being put in all around outside of Jackman and Liev Schreiber as Sabertooth.
PAN & Reminiscence
I’m going to lump these two films together because there is such a strange dichotomy between them.
Pan is a movie filled with poor decisions. The casting of the movie is famously terrible (outside of Jackman who is an inspired choice as Blackbeard) the movie is way too self serious, and the third act is absolute poo. The fact that a Peter Pan movie existed when nobody asked for it also is a bad choice in itself.
Pan is an uninteresting movie with uninteresting ideas…done poorly.
Reminiscence, on the other hand, is an ambitious story with a great cast and world-class special effects, and it tries its best to build an interesting and engrossing world. The problem is Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. It’s not because they are bad at their jobs. They really are not. The problem is the fact that they make very complex things that are very much better fit into a season of television. The pacing is all over the place, and because of that, the story is hard to follow. It’s a 118-minute movie that feels like a 156-minute movie.
Reminiscence is a very interesting movie with very interesting ideas….done poorly.
One movie is an outright turd. The other is a polished turd. Both belong in this category equally.
CINEMATIC APOGEE
As great as Jackman has been in other things, of course, his cinematic apogee was going to be related to Wolverine. And yes, it would be very easy to point out the action stuff that Wolverine has done up until this point. The raid on the mansion in X2, where we finally get to see Wolverine kill some folks, is one thing you could easily point out.
One scene that you could point out is in the new Deadpool and wolverine. Not to be spoilery or anything like that, but right before the final battle in that movie happens, Wolverine does something that he’s never done before. He completely becomes Wolverine, let’s just say. And when he did, the audience that I saw that movie with collectively gasped…and then cheered very loudly. But you know what? That’s not it either. In my humble opinion, The cinematic apogee of Jackman AND the Wolverine movie portrayal is something that shows off the skills of both character and actor, and that undoubtedly comes with this scene…
This scene alone is why the answer to the question of who is the greatest actor to ever play a superhero is Jackman. Wolverine is one of the most iconic comic book characters in existence. I’ve met more than one person who has tattoos of this character on their bodies, and to meet the expectations of those fanatical individuals is one thing. But to also read the comics, you will find out that Logan does have a vulnerable side. He is a character of great pain, and that’s not really spoken of all that much about the character. We’ve seen Jackman have emotional scenes throughout the X-Men universe films, of course, but not a lot of them had a lot of weight to them because the films that those scenes were in were often pretty bad. This scene is as heavy as superhero films can possibly be, and it hits differently for many reasons. At this point, Logan is such a broken man that he literally can’t say anything to confront the pain of Xavier’s loss, and that is conveyed so much through the physicality of Jackman just standing there trying to figure out what to say.
And we’ve all been there, right? Maybe not because we failed the person we’ve lost, as Logan feels that he’s done with Charles, but just the fact that the person you love is gone. The thudding finality of that is portrayed in this scene better than in most movies, where you get some soap opera-level monologue with a string section blasting in the background. I find this to be an incredibly hard scene to watch because we’ve all been there before in some way.
**************
I don’t know if it’s accurate to call Hugh Jackman underrated. Seems ridiculous to say. But when you do consider that he is on the A-list and that he really is one of the more upper-echelon movie stars of our time. There isn’t a lot of A-list superstar regality given to his status. He hasn’t dated anybody famous, there’s been no scandals, he does Broadway, he hosted the Oscars and the Tonys. People tend to forget a lot of the major directors that he’s already worked with, and a lot of his famous non-Wolverine movies are not really in the cultural zeitgeist like that. There’s a lot of “oh, I forgot about that movie” type sentiment when his great movies are mentioned.
Hugh Jackman is a legend. He’s not merely a superstar, and he’s not exactly an icon, either, but he’s close. His resume speaks for itself.Â
