The Wolverine We Deserve

The Wolverine
Directed by James Mangold
Two and One Half Stars

By Jon Fisher

James Mangold’s The Wolverine does what it says on the tin – it provides action and special effects on a mostly lavish scale, while attempting to add a touch of humanity to its proceedings. Whether any real enjoyment can be gained from the film outside of those parameters is another question, but rest assured – if you want to plonk yourself down and watch pretty pictures fly across a movie screen, you can do worse than The Wolverine.

I tend to want a bit more than that from movies, even from superhero movies, which often get a free pass from audiences and critics by virtue of their supposedly juvenile source material. There isn't any reason why the Joker or, indeed, the Wolverine cannot be as compelling and exciting a character as Jake LaMotta or Anton Chigurh. Admittedly, the best superhero movies tend to fall under the banner of a ‘momentous spectacle’ rather than a quiet, introspective ‘art’ movie. The Wolverine doesn't really go for anything spectacular. Director James Mangold (Walk the Line) is someone I've always found to be a competent but unimaginative film-maker, and his interpretation of an X-Men movie is just about what I would have expected.

This latest Wolverine film focuses again on the grizzled, moody Logan (Hugh Jackman), who has retreated to the mountains to live a quiet, anonymous life. He is tormented by hallucinations of his late wife Jean Grey (killed in X-Men: The Last Stand [2006], the events of which this movie picks up from].

The plot incorporates some typical comic-book fare with an Asian twist that has become so prominent in many recent blockbusters, perhaps as a nod to Hollywood’s largest emerging market. Logan is approached by a telepathic Japanese mutant named Yukio, who asks him to come to Tokyo to visit with Yashida, the CEO of a technology corporation who is dying of cancer. Logan rescued this man from the Nagasaki nuclear bomb many years earlier, and Yashida wishes to offer Logan an out from his existential malaise – a transplant of Logan’s immortality, which will allow Yashida to continue living, while also providing Logan with a normal life and death.

This thematic quandary had the potential to be quite interesting. Logan, the immortal antihero with no reason to continue to exist, could have been set up for a satisfying character arc. Indeed, much of The Wolverine’s quieter moments serve to demonstrate Logan’s growing fondness for a new love interest and for life generally. It’s unfortunate that this story is trapped in a movie that, almost by necessity, is obliged to descend periodically into long and frantic action sequences. Action movies in the modern age are almost always visually satisfying, and The Wolverine is competently made but unsurprising. When Logan and his femme du jour take a seat on the bullet train and comment on the 300 mph capability of the vehicle, we know that we’ll see an action sequence on the roof. In an age where literally any action scenario can be presented believably and thrillingly, story becomes more important than ever.

Here, there are hints of a satisfying story that never really eventuate in any depth, and the action components of the film are reasonably predictable. We can guess who the bad guy is going to be almost literally before we meet him. The supporting cast is attractive, but their characters rather unremarkable. In an age where superhero films are taking the ‘momentous spectacle’ to another level (Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, The Avengers), The Wolverine sits somewhere between the middle and lower third of the pack. Fine for a Saturday night with a couple of beers, but not for much more than that.