Review 257: The Wolverine

The Wolverine is an excellent sequel and one of the intense and brutal superhero movies ever.

Based on the limited series Wolverine by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, Some time after X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan travels to Japan, where he engages a figure from his past in a fight that has lasting consequences. Vulnerable for the first time, and pushed to his physical and emotional limits, he confronts not only lethal samurai steel, but also his inner struggle against his own immortality, emerging more powerful than ever before.

The plot is brilliant. We get a story that feels very influenced in Japanese mythology and legend with Samurais, Ronin and Ninjas really cool stuff, so there's lots of samurai swordfighting and loads of Japanese culture to be found in the film.

But it's true strength lies in it's portrayal of Wolverine's journey, when we meet him in this film we find him as a broken man who is damaged by the decisions he had to make in X-Men: The Last Stand, he's now living as a hermit and he's wrestling with a lot of inner demons. His own sense of isolation due to his immortality. In Samurai Legend and Terminology, a Ronin is a Samurai without a cause and without a purpose. Wolverine is the ultimate outsider and in this film we see him more isolated and alone than I think we've ever seen him before.

Then he is thrown into this entirely new world a world full of honour, tradition and customs which puts him at a great constrast with the people of Japan and this film is all about him trying to let go of his guilt and rediscover his sense of purpose.

At the heart of the film is a story about Wolverine being surrounded by death whilst at the same time being unable to die due to his healing factor. Wolverine is a character who has lived for many years and met and lost so many people and become a loner essentially, because he can never die, he will always be alone and that's a burden that weighs heavily on Logan. 

Immortality is something of a double-edged sword, on the one hand it means you can never die but then when you can live forever, what do you live for, people around you start dying whilst you remain alive and well and the world as you know it changes until you're just a shadow of the  world you once knew. You can run out of things to live and with Wolverine, you get the sense that he has reached that point in this film. 

and to see him in such a vulnerable situation, without his immortality, is really exciting, intense and interesting. 

All of that is fine and dandy until we get to the final act and I don't know about you but I felt some of the decisions the filmmakers took we're a tad ill-conceived. It got very comic bookish/cartoonish and kind of broke away from the stylised, Samurai approach the film took. It's not that it was a bad final or anything like that, it just felt like it came from an entirely different movie and just didn't fit with the tone of the rest of the film. 

Director James Mangold's direction is tense and stylish, the cinematography is solid and captures the beauty and exoticness of Japan, the special effects are terrific, the score by Marco Beltrami is fantastically, beautiful, bringing out some noir, Spaghetti Western and samurai esque cues, the production design (for all the different locations in Japan) is stunning, the scenery is breathtaking, the costumes are vibrant and colourful and capture the sense of honour and tradition of Japan the violence is brutal, the action scenes are exciting, intensely shot, fast paced and well choreographed and feel deeply rooted in the mythology and religion of Samurai. 

The locations are beautiful, Modern day Japan serves as superb, immersive backdrop. The make up is rich and wonderfully detailed and the sound effects are superb. 

The opening scenes set in World War II Nagasaki are both brutal, poignant and powerful the tension keeps notching up, 

The acting for the most part is fantastic, Hugh Jackman is just awesome in this, this is the first time we literally see Wolverine vulnerable, he's stripped of his healing power and when a weapon hurts him, we see him in genuine pain, we almost feel it with him and that makes him wilder than we've ever seen him up to this point and is confronting his inner demons which for me makes for a more dramatic and emotionally conflicted performance. He is a character who is so sick of living and so sick of his healing power - wouldn't it be great if he could just end it all and not have to live anymore.

Rila Fukushima is badass as Yukio, she is very protective of Logan and to see their relationship grow and expand throughout the film as well as see they have a lot in common is fascinating.

Tao Okamoto is luminous and lovely as Mariko Yashida, she's a really sympathetic character because she's a young woman about to inherit her grandfathers business so she has a big burden to take on and the way she protects Wolverine and starts to settle down with him makes for a beautiful love story.

Also effective in the cast is Will Yun Lee as Harada, he's the would-be hero with good intentions, who allows himself to be used for nefarious purposes because he adopts an ends based outlook that's countered to Logan's ultimate "do what's right despite how things turn out" attitude. Like Logan in the Weapon X program in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Harada lets himself be used as someone else's weapon and doesn't realise he's a pawn until it's too late.

Over the course of the film he does some pretty deplorable things in the name of protecting Mariko whom he loves and who once hoped in vain to be together with him because he thinks going along with Viper's plot is necessary to keep Mariko safe.

His character ultimatly parallels with Logan because they inform why Mariko comes to fall so hard for Logan, a man who initially she doesn't want help from and tricks away from because she sees him as an almost mythic figure.   

Hiroyuki Sanada is also solid as Shingen Yashida, he's grown hateful, spiteful even of his father for conscribing the company to Mariko as opposed to him and 

Haruhiko Yamanouchi is both powerful and sinister as Yashida, the head of the Yashida corporation. Wolverine saved his life in Nagasaki and he's been obsessed with Logan's healing factor his entire life immortality and now that he's dying he's determined to gain that healing factor and, as he see's it, return the favour to Wolverine. This drives him to some very extreme measures to gain Wolverine's healing factor for himself and I think thats a great example of showing how immortality can corrupt people and show it a metaphor for greed or a drug or perhaps an obsession.

The one weak link in the cast is Russian actress, Svetlana Khodchenkova as Viper. Despite her good looks, the performance seems bizarrely flat & detached and seems to have relied on audio-dubbing. I also don't see why they felt the need to have given Viper/Madame Hydra snake-like powers at all, whereas in the comics she's an expert martial artist, she's essentially the evil version of Black Widow. I get that she is supposed to represent what Logan might have been if he didn't listen to his concious and gave into his basic instincts and that she justifies her actions by saying it is who she is and by doing so over a very long period of time she's lost all empathy she once had. but the character goes shockingly underdeveloped and I strongly feel they should have hired a stronger actress to convey the above.

I attribute my decision to dismiss her performance to a little something known as the Orlando Bloom effect in that no one will notice a pretty actor or actress who can't act if he or she is acting opposite actors who are 100 times better than her.

The Wolverine is a brutal superhero film and I look forward to Days of Future Past coming out next year, 4/5.

The Anonymous Critic.