Yanked out from his loneliness, Logan finds himself caught up in a world where there’s meaning in everything.
What They Say:
Hugh Jackman returns as Wolverine in this sequel to the member of the X-Men’s first solo outing. Mark Bomback and The Usual Suspects’ Christopher McQuarrie penned the script, which takes its inspiration from the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller Marvel miniseries from the 1980s dealing with the character’s adventures in Japan as he fights ninjas in the ceremonial garb of the samurai.
The Review:
When it comes to comic book movies, I always feel that there’s a bit of a requirement to provide some bona fides before talking about it. I still remember picking up my first copy of Uncanny X-Men back as a young kid and being enthralled with it and what it offered, coming at a time where the title was just about to become huge. Spending a few years buying most of the back issues and going forward for another ten years or so of issues and series before falling out with Marvel in general, there’s a deep love for the characters and, more specifically, what Chris Claremont did with them for so long. When the movies started in 2000, I liked a lot of the casting but hated the original trilogy. I didn’t care much for Origins either, though once again, it’s the casting that helped it work in what it did because Hugh Jackman in particular just hits all the right notes for me. When First Class hit, we once again got a wide divergence from the core origins, which I expect, but it was the first time an X-Men movie felt like a film.
With The Wolverine, we get the second instance of it where it’s not a movie but a film that involves people with powers. With a lot of problems getting off the ground, between director changes and the disaster in Japan that pushed everything back, what we get in the end is a film that is largely a strong work and a proper sense of closure and beginnings for the title character. What this film has to do is difficult in that it must – must – stand by itself but also serve as a bridge between a trilogy that caused a slew of problems continuity wise and the new series of films that’s going to try and correct it all. At the heart of the film franchise, Wolverine is its strongest name character overall and it’s a character that launched Hugh Jackman to international fame, something I’m glad of and also because he’s fully aware of it and continues to try and do the best he can by the character for the fans, since he himself is a fan.
The premise of the film really is simple, but it works well in that we have Logan being drawn to Japan after spending a few years in hiding in the relative wilderness where he’s coping with the death of Jean, which he had caused since she was going out of control. It’s not given a lot of exposition when you get down to it, but she’s a persistent presence in the film throughout as Logan is just intent on staying out of everything, giving up on the world, and wallowing in his pain. But because he had helped someone survive Nagasaki back when the bomb was dropped, that man, Yashida, is now calling him back to Japan to say goodbye to him and to thank him. Yashida has used his life well it seems, building a massive company that potentially does a lot of good, but there’s a lot of strife within the family due to succession issues. While his son, an adult man named Shingen, is expected to take over when his father dies, it’s instead going to his granddaughter Mariko. There’s some interesting aspects to this that plays well to the cultural side of it, and with how Mariko feels about it all, but it’s also a bit of the overall trappings that’s used to draw Logan in.
Unfortunately, Yashida has an ulterior motive in drawing Logan here as he wants to be able to “cure” him and his inability to die by taking on that power himself as Yashida wants to live forever to build his empire even more. It’s an interesting twist to it, one that I didn’t see coming in what Yashida was offering, and it’s one that Logan doesn’t exactly leap at even though he’s suffering himself and wants to pass on so he can be with Jean in the afterlife. Not surprisingly, things don’t go well, Yashida dies before anything can be done and that puts all focus on Mariko as the yakuza are after her to stop her from taking over the company. And while Logan doesn’t want to get involved in anything, he can’t help but to be drawn to protecting her through her grandfather and that has him doing everything he can to keep her alive as the mystery of what the true struggle is all about. And that’s a solid story, one that works well overall.
Having been a fan of the original comic series that served as inspiration for this, I was easily going into this expecting changes and not a strict adaptation for so many obvious reasons. While things took a bit to get going, once they hit Japan, it just became an engrossing film, especially since about 90% of the film takes place there. One of the things that got from what goes on here is that once there, other than Viper, it’s an all Asian cast (well, outside of the bimbos brief scene). With some inclusion of Jean along the way in dream sequences, we get a very non-white film and that’s something that I think will be glossed over by some without realizing the importance of it. With Logan in Japan and spending so much time with Mariko – from love hotels to an older home in Nagasaki and through all the elaborate mansion aspects of Yashida’s residence – it’s made clear that everything has meaning and that gets tough for Logan to accept. And one of the big meanings here is that it’s a very non-white big picture movie, albeit one carried by Hugh Jackman. But it’s carried off in such a natural way, with how Logan is first distant with Mariko, then protective of her because of her grandfather and finally falling for her, it works well. There is that aspect where you think it’s going to be superficial, but then their relationship is infused with surprise meaning as she relates the stories her grandfather told her of Logan from when he was young, how he was an animal, but one that would protect her. And now that she needs protecting, he’s there, and those childhood feelings have turned into something more and the connection between the two allows them to come together well.
The other thing that got me with this film is that, while there are a lot of big action sequences and they work very well, even if the last one plays out a bit longer than it should, is that this is one of those times where this does feel more like a movie, which we touched on earlier. While the superhero boom owes a lot to films like the original X-Men, they had to play it a lot safer in design and execution but there was still a certain kind of goofiness to it that didn’t click for me. As we got into the later movies, with Batman Begins and Iron Man and so forth from there with the various franchise, there was a growing trend and sense of them being both grounded and more fantastic in a way, and the talent draw was very different. With Mangold directing here and a very precise script where it treats things properly and does work with the “everything has meaning” angle, we get something that delves into it well and doesn’t try to force events. It feels like a natural flow. It also helps that the setting is vastly different than all the other X-Men films and it’s like other world he gets immersed into that will help him grow and change into who he needs to be for the next phase.
And that mid-credits sequence, which is definitely worth staying for, is great. As Mangold said, he doesn’t have to answer any of the questions here, he just gets the fun of posing them and setting everything up to come. It’s brief overall, but it’s one that brings in some fun characters that I didn’t expect, makes the nods towards Days of Future Past with Trask Industries – which very much plays into part of the feeling for this film as well – and gives us a properly grounded and fresh Logan that’s ready to move forward. And that should save a lot of time in that upcoming film since they won’t have to take any time getting Logan into the place he needs to be.
In Summary:
While I had certain trepidations about this film going into it since it’s working off of a very well known story and had its issues getting off the ground, I kept finding myself really surprised over and over during it that they were doing things so well. So polished and proper in a way, where it has the look it needs to in order to represent different areas and classes of living in Japan. It’s not done for silly laughs or gags of “look how different they are”, which thankfully has dropped off over the years, but rather to enhance the story and the setting. With family issues arriving, an interesting array of villains that surface and disappear and a background plot of something much larger going on, The Wolverine just hit the right note scene after scene for me. I’ve long liked the character (though his comics overexposure drove me away from Marvel Comics altogether) and Hugh Jackman is definitely very solid here with him, finally getting a film and story worthy of the character. This is the movie you wish was made first and then grown the franchise from there. The Wolverine was another in a line of very, very enjoyable and strong movies to see this summer. Highly recommended.
Grade: A
