The Wolverine

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by Moosey, Jan 1, 2014.

  1. Moosey

    Moosey invariably, a moose Supporter

    Review of The Wolverine (2013)

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh1LdTFkm7I"]The Wolverine - Official Trailer (2013) [HD] Hugh Jackman - YouTube[/ame]

    After the fairly dreadful X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I think the expectations for this second Wolverine solo film were fairly low. However, after getting it for Christmas on DVD, I thought I'd give it a try and would have to say, it's probably the best of the X-Men films so far.

    Narrowing the scope to a single X-man allows the story to occur at a smaller scale without the need for a "Bwahahaha I will destroy the world!" cheese-fest for a villain. Instead, mutant powers are relatively downplayed and this becomes something of a tech-thriller in the Bourne Supremacy / Mission Impossible style. Taking its inspiration from one of the best 1980s X-Men stories, where Wolverine becomes involved with the machinations of the Yashida criminal family in Tokyo, The Wolverine updates the story to modern day Japan and sees Logan convinced to meet with a dying Japanese businessman 60 years after Logan saved his life in a prisoner of war camp in World War 2. From there, espionage, double-dealing and intrigue take place but, thankfully, no huge laser/ice-beam/explosion-fest battles levelling cities.

    As with most of the X-Men movies, Hugh Jackman gets away with being much too tall for the character by hitting every other character trait perfectly; just like the comic book character, he's grouchy, stand-offish but ultimately caring and with a sense of right and wrong. As Wolverine's powers are fairly low-key by superhero standards (he heals very quickly and has metal bones with implanted retractible metal claws) this makes it easier to include him in street-level, face-to-face action which is more exciting to watch and easier to stage convincingly than larger scale mutant power battles.

    Indeed the only times when the film lost my engagement was when they shoehorned mutant powers into the film unnecessarily (particularly, Viper, a regular human in the comics, is given weird snake-like mutant abilities with no apparent advantage to the story). Similarly, the inclusion of references to X-Men 3 seems like a mistake to me as The Wolverine would have worked just as well without reminding the watcher of the more absurd and less interesting X-Men 3.

    As an action film, this works excellently and as an adaptation of a well-liked comic book story it also works pretty well.

    Rating: 4/5


    P.S. For the more nerdtastic, like me, the only disappointment was

    The fact that Keniuchio Harada is not the Silver Samurai - instead the Silver Samurai is a robotic battle suit worn by... someone else.
     

Share This Page