By Brett Blake THE WOLVERINE is a really, really solid movie. Just shy of a great movie, even. That’s no doubt a big surprise for most people to hear, but I’m relieved to report that it’s true (or at least in my case it is). During the buildup for the film, the marketing campaign was uninspired (save for a few evocative posters of the variety you see to the left as you read this), and one couldn’t help but wonder if there was anything left in the tank, so-to-speak, for the character of Wolverine. Was there more story to tell? What situations could be applied to him that we haven’t already seen? On top of those questions, there’s also the issue of Wolverine’s last stand-alone picture, 2009’s X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, which was almost universally disliked. For the record, I’m one of the three people in the known world who didn’t outright hate that film, but I’ll certainly concede that it damaged the Wolverine brand in the eyes of the population at large, and it’s a film I like less and less as time goes on. So, with all of that taken into account, I can’t stress how refreshingly good a movie THE WOLVERINE is. Taking its inspiration from a legendary comics miniseries by Frank Miller and Chris Claremont, this new film finds Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) traveling to Japan at the behest of a man whose life he saved during World War II. The proverbial “stranger in a strange land,” Logan must navigate foreign customs and the murky waters surrounding a wealthy Japanese industrialist and the intricate relationships between that man’s family and employees, as well as politicians and elements of the Japanese mob. Indeed, there are whole stretches of the movie where the storyline feels more like a straight urban crime thriller than a “superhero” story, and that’s a compliment, particularly as these components are surprisingly compelling, not simple filler material to pad out the plot between action setpieces. The character of Wolverine has been defined and owned by Hugh Jackman since he first took on the role in the first X-MEN film back in 2000, and it’s the kind of role that lives or dies with the charisma of its actor; luckily, the character has been in Jackman’s more than capable hands, and even in some of the series’ lesser entries, he’s always given it his all. That being said, this is easily - unquestionably - Jackman’s finest hour as Wolverine, primarily because it’s the first in the franchise that feels fully dedicated to examining the character’s wounded psyche. We find the character in a pretty low place, haunted by visions from his past, and frequently brooding over the things he’s done and the kind of man he is. That sort of stuff could get depressing real fast, but it’s handled with a delicate touch, and it provides Jackman some terrific scenes of true emotion. It helps that the screenplay actually puts some intriguing characters around Logan this time out, characters whose stories could almost support films of their own, no Wolverine needed. Perhaps the most pleasant surprises in that vein are the two female characters of Mariko (Tao Okamoto) and Yukio (Rila Fukushima); Logan’s relationships with these two women are the backbone of the story, and there are countless great character moments between them that really elevate the movie. These moments are not afterthoughts or window dressing, they’re key pieces of what the movie is trying to achieve, which is to ground itself in genuine human feeling. It’s kind of unfortunate that having two compelling women in a movie is reason to be “pleasantly surprised,” as that speaks to the depressingly lackluster female characters usually found in big-budget blockbusters, but that’s a subject for another column. I’ve seen the word “dark” bandied about when describing the tone of the movie, but I’d sort of disagree with that label; it’s not darker than the other X-MENs, so much as it’s a slightly more mature and complex take on Wolverine. He’s the same man we know, but the filmmakers have focused a more emotionally-realistic lens on him this time around. It’s an unusually thoughtful approach to a comic book movie, and although it might be hard to believe, THE WOLVERINE is more a character study with action movie overtones than an action movie that’s paying lip service to the characters and their emotional lives. That’s not to say that there isn’t much action, because there’s plenty, and it’s all pretty cool stuff. We get a variety of setpieces, from bigger-scale chase sequences, to more intimate fights. The fight choreography of the Japanese characters, in particular, adds an interesting flavor and color to contrast with Wolverine’s stab-and-slash method of dispatching his enemies. The action highlight of the movie is surely the sequence involving a fight on top of a speeding bullet train; it looked cheesy as hell in the trailers, but on the big screen it’s a blast, and one that doesn’t overstay its welcome or threaten to stop the movie in its tracks (pun intended). The movie is not without at least one giant flaw, and it appears in the form of its third act, which has some major problems, chief among these that it doesn’t feel like a conclusion to the movie that comes before it. It’s like the finale from a completely different film was surgically stitched onto the back end of the screenplay. The introspective quality of the first two-thirds goes out the window for a climax that basically devolves into a “What would happen if Wolverine fought a giant, Japanese-style, vaguely Iron Man-type robotic suit?” scenario. Going hand-in-hand with this, there’s the issue of the villains and their overall scheme, which is unimpressive. Without getting into too much detail, there were opportunities for the film to take the primary villain (here nameless for spoiler reasons) into some psychologically rich, even moving territory, as the movie sets up all the groundwork for that kind of cathartic ending earlier in the story, but it drops the ball. The ending doesn’t kill the movie dead, but it is somewhat disappointing. Even so, THE WOLVERINE is thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining, and although it doesn’t quite achieve full greatness, it gets more right about the character than any of the X-MEN films to date, and its thoughtfulness should be appreciated by discerning fans of comic book cinema. I sure appreciate it, at any rate.
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