Good news, everybody! We no longer need that Highlander remake. Well, okay, technically we “never” needed that Highlander remake, but James Mangold’s The Wolverine is pretty much the best we could have hoped for anyway.
The Wolverine stars Hugh Jackman as, once again, Wolverine (aka Logan, aka James Howlett), a superpowered mutant with nearly unbreakable adamantium claws and an immune system so effective that he can shrug off any wound and he never seems to age. He’s been alive for over 100 years and he’s getting pretty sick of it by now, especially after the events of Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand forced him to kill the woman he loved, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). Then again, I suppose Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand made most of us want to die a little.
REVIEW: Witney Seibold calls The Wolverine “a mildly bonkers affair.”
So when the events of The Wolverine pick up, Logan has isolated himself from the world, living alone in the woods, vowing to never kill again. This goes very well. He stays put and lives alone with nothing of interest happening to him until the end of time. Except the exact opposite happens, and he’s dragged to Japan where an old ally named Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi) is dying. Yashida offers to remove Logan’s “healing factor” and, thanks to a mysterious scientist played by Svetlana Khodchenkova, transfer it to himself. The logic is that Logan lives forever but has nothing to live for, whereas Yashida is dying but his family and business are both in disarray.
It seems like a decent bargain, but Logan doesn’t jump at it right away and Yashida dies the next day, leaving a family of ninjas and assholes behind to backstab each other and try to kill Yashida’s granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto), for unknown reasons. Logan vows to protect her but only after his trusty healing powers go haywire, meaning that this immortal, unstoppable badass is suddenly very mortal, and relatively easy to stop.
The Wolverine is a crisp, well written and exciting superhero movie with a very samurai flavor… again, not unlike Highlander (not as much, but still). Although Mangold & Co. can’t quite resist the obvious “stranger in a strange” land jokes, forcing Wolverine to learn aspects of Japanese culture that by all rights he really should have known by now (we learn early on that he’s no stranger to the country), it’s The Wolverine’s tone that feels distinct, eschewing traditional explosion dynamics for (mostly) smaller altercations that emphasize the physical impact of personal combat. James Mangold films these sequences cleanly and cleverly, and puts overedited pap like The Lone Ranger and Star Trek Into Darkness to shame.
That Wolverine is only experiencing the after effects of bodily harm for the first time makes the more modest altercations feel more exciting and meaningful than the larger action sequences found in those summer movies. It’s common for a hero to shrug off a bullet wound – Wolverine himself has done it countless times – but this is different, and it feels that way to both the character and the audience. The Wolverine is about the problems of old men, whether or not they look their age, and the film’s focus on the physical failings of both Logan and Yashida – as well as their lifetime of regrets – leaves Mangold’s movie feeling relatively mature compared to most of the other action movies on the market.
The Wolverine sprawls a bit too much for its own good, telegraphing a climactic plot twist too early, occasionally delving into goofiness and making its story a little more complicated than necessary, but the biggest flaw is actually the mid-credits teaser. You may have heard about this already, you may not, and I won’t go out of my way to ruin the events for you, but let’s put it like this: The Wolverine concludes with a question about the hero’s future, and the teaser answers that question immediately, with the opposite of drama. It asks a new question, but it poses that question such in a trite manner that it feels more like a blasé press release than a proper scene in a movie. The Wolverine ended just fine until it actually ended, and with an unrelated afterthought no less. Yes, I want to see what comes next too, but I also wanted this film to end where it was clearly supposed to so I could have walked home fully satisfied.
But if you leave as soon as the credits roll, The Wolverine is actually one of the most satisfying films in the long-running X-Men franchise. The focus is on the character, the character is on a journey that only this character (or a Highlander) could go through, the cast is game and the action is slick as hell. Would that all superhero movies were this well conceived, except for the cruddy commercial break at the end.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
