Film: The Wolverine

Director: James Mangold
Genre: Action
Source: USA (2013)
Rating: PG-13
Location/Format: Glynn Place Stadium Cinemas
Grade: B+

Hey, after the abomination that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine (a title which tells you they somehow thought that piece of garbage would be the beginning of a series of stand-alone X-Men movies), James Mangold's The Wolverine looks like a work of art. It's not, but it's a pretty good superhero movie in a world now full of pretty ok superhero movies. It wasn't as fun as Pacific Rim, but in my book it beat out both Man of Steel and Iron Man 3 for summer action fun.

Wolverine is a hero with a unique advantage over other superheros, at least from a storytelling perspective: given his healing ability he has a much longer history, and though none of the films in which he features have done much of a job really exploring his origin in a satisfying way (see the above mentioned Origins-titled film, which was so bad I will bring it up again only to say how bad it was), that long lifespan does mean he has plenty of emotional back story and baggage that filmmakers can mine. Here the roots of the modern-day story go back to WWII, when Logan is (inexplicably, which I like) a prisoner of the Japanese being held outside Nagasaki. You can guess where this is going, and indeed he is present (and able to save the life of a Japanese soldier) when the atomic bomb goes off. Fast forward seventy years, and Logan is now alone, haunted by the events of the third X-men movie (another dismal X-men movie outing), and living in the Yukon. A series of events brings him back to Japan, and his own immortal nature is brought into question.

Mangold doesn't really go deep into the pain of immortality, but he does bring up the question of the cost of living forever: what does it mean when everyone around you dies and you keep going? Jackman is still solid as this character, playing him as both rougher (more swearing here than I remember in other X-films) and more violent than in the past, but with shades of despair. It's a good choice, and it allows Wolverine to have more character depth than in the past.

Not everything in the movie works, though. The film has some really great side characters--particularly Rila Fukushima as Yukio--but it also has some dumb ones, including a mutant villain named Viper whose addition in the story seems only based on the idea that audiences want more mutants. She doesn't really work that well, and her motivations are never clear. Similarly, the "big bad" in the movie is predictable and a little bit silly.

Still, there were a lot of great fight scenes in the movie that feature some fun choreography and interesting locations--whatever physics were defied in the train sequence, for example, the battle still managed to be very entertaining. It was good popcorn fun, and if it's not as good as X-Men First Class or X-Men 2, it still does a pretty good job allowing this world to have a little more development, and this character to have a little more depth. It ain't Shakespeare, but it's worth a few dollars.

Alternate Film Title: "That Hospital Bed Looks Really Uncomfortable"