Wolverine The Great
Director James Mangold brings a furrowed-brow solemnity to the comic-book world of Marvel’s blade-fisted antihero, The Wolverine. One that scratches and claws against the law of diminishing returns always destined to beset the splintering X-Men franchise.
Inspired by the 1982 Chris Claremont & Frank Miller Wolverine miniseries, “The Wolverine” takes enough liberties to better adapt it to the Marvel X-Universe that Fox has been building towards.
Haunted by the death of Jean Grey, former X-Man Logan (Hugh Jackman) is now a loner, foraging in the woods. But he’s tracked down and brought to Japan by a billionaire who’s keen to repay a life debt by stripping the Wolverine of his immortality.
Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a katana-wielding assassin with an intriguing back-story of her own, accompanies Logan to Tokyo, where he meets his would-be benefactor, Lord Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi), now an elderly mega-rich industrialist who wishes to repay his debt to Wolverine. Not willing to embrace death, he offers Logan a chance to relieve him of his eternal suffering in an exchange for his healing abilities. Logan refuses to do so – believing it to be a curse rather than a gift – only to be drawn into a web of intriguing mystery that needs unraveling.
Mark Bomback and Scott Frank’s screenplay follows Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s popular Japan-set comic-book arc from 1982, but Mangold of “3:10 to Yuma” fame seeks to distance his film from those pulpy beginnings by embedding his protagonist in a conventional, near bromidic drama of familial squabbling, corruption and corporate greed.
Until a third act that collapses in a harebrained heap, the director largely succeeds in keeping the more fatuous aspects at bay, roughing up the surface with organically staged fight scenes and, raising the stakes by stripping his hitherto indestructible hero of his self-healing and regeneration powers.
Figuratively declawed, the Wolverine stumbles and bleeds, that intricately sculpted body which is hurting in tune with his inner torment.
That said, ’The Wolverine’ is that rare superhero film that is mindful of the cannon but works excellently as a rousing standalone action picture with a lot of heart and soul to it. Hugh Jackman like many before him – such as Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), Christian Bale (Batman) and Sean Connery (James Bond) – has made Wolverine his own. With the right mix of vulnerability, steel and extremely buffed body, he creates an emotionally wounded superhero we can look up to and identify with.
The action set pieces from the dropping of the atomic bomb in the beginning, to the fight on the bullet train and the slightly silly climax are suitably gob-smacking. Unlike its predecessor the action in this movie is nicely balanced with the quieter moments and meditations of mortality.
Despite being an improvement on the last outing for Jackman’s not-so-merry mutant the movie leaves you with a sense of unfulfilled desire.
Regardless, the X-Men film series that started promisingly and then spun into a dive and was successfully rebooted thanks to the prequel “X-Men: First Class” is now at a point where the franchise has been snicked into strands so twisted from each other that its getting tough to trace the genealogy. Inconsistency is inevitable in a world that’s constantly being dug up with new characters and done over, leaving us no time to fall in love with anything being flung at us.
Heroes wander in, heroes wander out. Wolverine – the indestructible centerpiece of the buffet’s spread – isn’t waning, but Box Office results show otherwise. Here a superhero strives to be ordinary. As Marvel continues to claw the character’s mystique away, he’s starting to get his wish.
