Director: James Mangold
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Rila Fukushima, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Tao Okamoto
There hasn’t been a great X-Men film since 2003. The Last Stand and Origins are unfairly hated but they aren’t in the same league as X-Men and X2. First Class was a good film, very entertaining and the best effects the series has seen so far, but the fact that it was a prequel telling the story that Xavier skimmed over in the first film meant we new what the ending was going to be before it happened. The latest film in the series is The Wolverine which is disappointing in moments but not in others and it’s claim as an X-Men film is fairly dubious.
Yukio (Rila Fukushima) is employed by dying Japanese World War 2 veteran Master Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi) to find his saviour, Logan/The Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), from the Nagasaki bomb. Logan is brought to Japan to find that Yashida wants to remove Logan’s immortality. When he refuses, Yashida’s chemist Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) takes it by force and Logan finds himself as vulnerable as anyone else. He and Yashida’s daughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto) find themselves on the run from the Yakuza clan.
I do need to get one thing clear that director James Mangold completely forgot while promoting the film. This is not an X-Men film! This a spin-off for Wolverine to have his own adventure. Origins is still part of the series because it explains the story of Cyclops joining forces with Professor X as well. This film doesn’t even have X-Men in the title.
Another of this films many faults is it’s supposed grounded story. It’s trying to copy The Dark Knight by making it “realistic” which just doesn’t work. It works for Batman because it would be quite easy for a multimillionaire such as Bruce Wayne to get in a bulletproof suit and go out at night to fight crime. The villains are, no matter if they use chemical, gases etc to make themselves stronger, are terrorists at their heart. This just doesn’t work for a film about an angry Canadian with rapid healing abilities. Marvel’s The Amazing Spiderman tried the realism out but it just doesn’t work for fantasy based characters. If any DC film should be of inspiration here it’s not The Dark Knight, not that TDK isn’t brilliant, but Man of Steel which revelled in it’s fantasy yet still brought in very human elements. People with telepathy, telekinesis or lazer eyes aren’t realistic and aren’t going to be.
The characters in this are a bit of a hit and miss. Famke Janssen, portraying Jean Grey in the first time for 7 years, appears in too many dream sequences that by the end they start getting boring. Viper’s mutant abilities are never made clear and I couldn’t explain to you now what they are. Plus she’s no too original with many comparisons drawn to DC’s Poison Ivy. Will Yun Lee’s Harada is extremely cool but a bit too Hawkeye-esque and his motivations are never made clear by the end of the film.
The rivalries in the Yashida family aren’t particularly interesting, with the unskilled Mariko not bringing much to the table other than screaming, but the gem of the film is Yukio. Her powers to be able to see death in the future and a welcome slice of complexity to the film. A great performance from Fukushima as well.
The action in this is some of the best we’ve seen this series. The train sequence is hugely exhilarating and so are many of the other set-pieces but each one is teased in one of the various trailers, the one of the few disadvantages of Man of Steel. They’re aren’t many surprises due to this. The trailers even give us a glimpse of the final Wolverine VS Silver Samurai battle that was actually fairly dull when it came.
The CGI in the final battle isn’t up to standard, there’s a huge amount of metal clashing, almost no sense of scale and a twist that a big flaw to the film. If Silver Samurai was teased or introduced earlier in the film, it would have benefited hugely.
I did say when it came out that Iron Man 3’s key strength was that you don’t miss The Avengers, and in Puss in Boots you don’t miss Shrek and Donkey, but the whole of the X-Men are completely forgotten here, as is the mutant persecution. Logan is a great character but what makes him watch-able is his rivalries with other mutants such as Cyclops, his rebellion against authority and his response to the humans hating the mutants. This is all gone and I did slightly miss the X-Men and I’m disappointed that I’ll have to wait another 12 months before I can find out what happened to them in the eight years between The Last Stand and Days of Future Past.
The Wolverine could have made more use of it’s Japanese setting other than the code of the Samurai and the flashing lights of Tokyo. Japan’s beautiful countryside is barely touched upon.
Hugh Jackman didn’t quite pack enough sincerity into this performance and, when his powers are taken away, we’re still wandering if a normal human could take that many gunshots anyway. After he takes his claws out and books them back in again why are there great big holes in his knuckles? But Jackman delivers the few comedic lines with slick sophistication. The fact that he can pull off the same leading role in 5 films, excluding the cameo in First Class, is truly incredible.
Better than both Origins and The Last Stand and certainly in the same league as First Class, this, although a spin-off, marks the tenth anniversary of the last awesome X-Men film but Bryan Singer’s return next year Days of Future Past, teased here in a Marvel signature post-credit sequence, will make us return faith to the franchise if all is well. The Wolverine is as not realistic, epic or quite as dark as the trailers proposed. It’s predictable throughout but some great set-pieces, humour and performances from Hugh Jackman and Rila Fukushima make this a entertaining piece of action cinema but leaves us wanting more of the film that the legend Darren Aronofsky came close to making. Could have done better with another Hollywood star but this does honour the Samurai unlike many action films have done.
6/10
“That all the men you brought?”
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