The Wolverine
This definitely should have been the first solo Wolverine movie. Not this exact movie, per se, but this story. Granted, I was one of the few, real supporters of 2009’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” but I barely remember, which really says something about the final product. This film, on the other hand, is closer to the better “X-Men” films, even if it has some issues of its own.
Another thing I kept thinking during the movie, aside from how this should have been the first solo Wolverine film, was that I would have killed to see Akira Kurosawa direct this film. Talk about wishful thinking, not the least because K passed away in 1998, but there’s something about this narrative (based on a popular storyline by Frank Miller and Chris Clairemont), and the way it presents Hugh Jackman’s Logan as a mutant samurai, with no master to serve, that I think would have intrigued Kurosawa (a master of the samurai epic) to tell this story of a 21st Century ronin, whose immortality is a curse to be endured. Plus, you know he would have rocked the action scenes, even if his sight was failing at the end of his life.
However, here we are with “The Wolverine,” directed by James Mangold, a journeyman who’s made “Walk the Line,” “Girl, Interrupted,” “Copland,” and “Knight of Day.” Hardly a stellar resume, but Mangold knows when he has good material to work with, and that is the case with “The Wolverine” (written by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank). It helps that, in Jackman, he has an actor completely committed to the role of Logan/Wolverine, and even after his sixth outing, it’s impossible to see anyone else playing the character.
“The Wolverine” does a couple of things really well as a narrative: first is the Logan-as-samurai notion, with the second being really exploring the idea of Logan as an immortal. He will never age, and even if he does form attachments to people, he will remain the same, and live to see those attachments die. Throughout the movie, he is haunted by one, such person: Jean Grey, who he was forced to kill for the sake of saving the world in “X-Men: The Last Stand.” Apart from how Frank and Bomback managed to salvage something out of that overstuffed, and undercooked, X-outing, they also add an affecting sense of loss to the story that Jackman plays wonderfully as it affects his interactions with Yukio (a bodyguard played by Rila Fukushima) and Mariko (Tao Okamoto), the granddaughter of a dying businessman (Hal Yamanouchi), whom Logan saved when the US bombed Nagasaki at the end of WWII. The old man has been grateful to Logan after all these years, and now, would like to repay him by giving the gift of an “honorable death” by taking his regenerative mutation from him, allowing him the possibility of a normal life.
Of course, the film is hardly a solemn meditation on mortality- I mean come on, it’s still a comic book movie- and there are plenty of thrills to be had, especially when Logan and Mariko, who’s been targeted the Yakuza crime syndicates, have to escape the grandfather’s funeral, and lead assassins on a chase that peaks on top of a bullet train. The climax of the film is more problematic in how it plays into every cliched, third act contrivance known to man, but an earlier blade-on-blade fight Logan has with Mariko’s father got me excited in a way I haven’t been about a Wolverine fight sequence since about midway through “X2” ten years ago. If that same energy, and the same narrative gravity, can find its way into next year’s eagerly-awaited adaptation of another famous X-story (“Days of Future Past”), Fox just may have not only my confidence, but other’s confidence, in the future of this mutant franchise for year’s to come. Keeping Jackman around for as long as possible would go a long way towards doing that.
