The X-Men brand seems to have sort of worn itself out. Yes, many loved X-Men: First Class, but even that felt a little stale to me on the heels of X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, neither of which exactly blew the doors off. Granted, I actually don’t think any of those are out-and-out disasters as much as I feel the franchise hit such a high note with X2 ten years ago that it has failed to live up to such lofty results ever since. It’s easy enough to find a film mildly entertaining, but I have yet to be as impressed as I was with Nightcrawler’s attack during the opening of X2, or an X-film that lived up to that film’s entirety. Cue drector James Mangold‘s The Wolverine.
As much as everyone disliked 2009’s Wolverine feature I found it to be something easily dismissed, yet easily consumed. It didn’t really move me one way or another, but early prospects of a Darren Aronofsky-directed follow-up (Aronofsky would eventually leave the project over “creative differences”) had me thinking we may finally start exploring more interesting territory with a character Hugh Jackman has now played on screen six times and will make it seven in next year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past.
His origin has been explored, his torment over the death of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), the fact he’s a loner and can’t control his temper, so what’s left? Well, a lot more of all that, though a theme that penetrates the first act involving Logan’s struggles of life vs. death are interesting, too bad they are so mishandled the rest of the way.
Once again we find Jackman as Logan (aka The Wolverine) brooding and alone. We’re witness to memories he has of the atom bomb being dropped during World War II and how he saved a Japanese soldier by the name of Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi) in the process. This is followed by memories of Jean Grey, telling him she’s waiting for him in the afterlife. Yeah, you could say he’s tormented.
Living alone in the wilderness the first allusions to him living the life of a ronin are hinted at. He’s also being watched in the shadows by a young red-headed girl we’ll soon come to know as Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a girl with the power of seeing into the future only it seems to be a bit glitchy as it comes and goes at strange times. Yukio, however, is one of the film’s early highlights. In fact the first 20 minutes or so are quite impressive.
It turns out Yukio has been spying on Logan at the behest of her adoptive father (who apparently found her in the garbage?), the very man Logan saved during World War II. He’s requested Logan’s presence beside his death bed, which leads to a trip to Tokyo. Bedside chatter, ulterior motives, double-crossing and a caretaker whose motivations are a bit cloudy get into the mix.
The first act ends as Yashida’s grand-daughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto) finds herself in a bit of trouble. Logan steps in and things are underway. Sort of. Truthfully, at this point the film stops doing much of anything for about an hour before the ultimate finale delivers a final 30 minutes of loud noises, yelling and “will he get out alive?” scenarios that we know the answer to before they begin.
The final two-thirds of The Wolverine are akin to taking a nap. I understand Mangold wanted to play this as something of a samurai film and, of the ten cinematic influences he listed, the most obvious are the visual references to Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds, but only in sporadic moments during the film’s opening did I feel we were close to getting anything similar to a true samurai film. Slow and dull does not equal samurai, though I’m sure much of the comic crowd that will hail this film as some sort of achievement will say that of classics from Seven Samurai to Sword of Doom.
Fact of the matter it’s difficult to be two things at once, especially if those two things are a classic samurai film and a 2013 Summer Blockbuster and to read that Jackman believes this is the Wolverine film he’s wanted to make ever since he first donned the claws is just sad because I do feel as if it’s one of his best performances as the character.
Even in the final two-thirds, while I was pinching myself in an effort to stay awake, Logan has several great lines, none better than “I don’t have time for this shit” as Yukio struggles to get to the point. Well said, Logan, I felt the same way about 45 minutes earlier about this film.
The villains of the piece are either conflicted “Who is that guy?” characters, nameless ninjas that apparently travel with a large number of arrows with ropes attached to them, children with daddy issues and the Viper character played by Svetlana Khodchenkova as some sort of cross between Charlize Theron and Abbie Cornish. There’s a moment where Viper sheds her skin like a snake and if you can figure out why it was necessary I’d love to hear it because it seemed to me like one of those moments where a studio exec would say, “Does she shed her skin? It would be so cool if she shed her skin. You gotta get her to shed her skin!” Well, she did and it makes zero sense amid a finale where all I wanted it to do was stop.
If there’s anything to be thankful for with The Wolverine is that it’s boring in a way much differently than the other summer blockbusters we’ve endured. It’s simply a miscalculation of narrative tone and understanding of what they were dealing with. Mangold clearly isn’t going for a mindless actioner, but instead a thoughtful story, but he lingers for so long on narrative elements that don’t matter everything else is forogtten. It’s also one of those films where the villain is 100% unnecessary. The villain is within Wolverine, why must he face an outward demon to deal with his inner demons?
At one point a character refers to Logan as a masterless Ronin (a redundant statement, but okay), playing on the death of Professor X (Patrick Stewart) in X-Men 3, but this piece of the story is left to linger and waft in the wind. Instead of so many tedious moments with a ghostly Jean Grey, that are meant to explore Logan’s struggles between an immortal life and a human death, but the metaphor is lost in repetition. The best influence this script could have hoped for was Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and oh boy would that have been glorious.
As if you needed any other sign the film is a dud, you could almost hear a collective sigh from the preview audience I watched this with, but most remained for the end credits scene that teases the next X-Men film. The scene runs about two minutes long and immediately after cheers, hoots, hollering and clapping erupted from the audience. They liked the two minute throwaway scene more than the movie itself! An excellent indicator when it comes to audience expectations with regard to today’s big budget movies. As long as they are promised more they will forget what they just saw and clap and cheer while doing so.
