Movie Review: The Wolverine (2013)

Now that The Wolverine is available for those of us that missed it in theaters, I decided I’d sit down and watch it.  My expectations were quite low, especially considering the rubbish that X-Men Origins: Wolverine turned out to be.  As it turned out, The Wolverine surpassed that one by far (not a difficult task, admittedly), but the movie still didn’t impress me as being anything special on the super hero movie scene.

The story is as follows - Logan is feeling sad after the events of the third X-Men movie.  He had to kill the lady he loved because she went nuts and now he’s vowed to live in the woods and drink whiskey for the rest of his existence.  Of course, that would make a very boring movie.  So instead, he is tracked down by a girl named Yukio who has been sent to retrieve him for Yashida, a Japanese guy that Logan once saved from atomic doom.

Yashida offers Logan a deal - he wants Logan’s regenerative abilities.  In exchange, Logan gets the chance to lead a normal life, to live and have a family and eventually die.  Given that Logan isn’t too happy with his seemingly eternal lifespan, it’s almost a good deal.  Logan says no, of course, and Yashida ends up dead (supposedly).

Next up, we have Yashida’s granddaughter, Mariko, whom he has left his massively powerful company to, getting kidnapped by Yakuza gangsters.  Logan steps up and saves her and then they go on the run.  Eventually they discover that Mariko’s father, Shingen is the one trying to kill her off so that he can have the company.  Logan and his allies take him down and then go off to get Mariko again, because this time she’s been captured by mysterious ninjas.  As it turns out, the ninjas work for a not-quite-dead Yashida who still wants Logan’s powers.  Fights happen.  Wolverine wins.  The end.

While this movie drew me in well enough for the first 60 or 70 percent, by the time Shingen was done with his place in the story and the whole ninja thing came up, I was left scratching my head.  At first I thought I was missing something, but then I realized that there were indeed two stories happening at the same time.  Unfortunately, neither story was compelling enough for me to give a crap.  I was more interested when Mariko and Logan were being chased and expected that to tie into Yashida’s arc, though it only did so on a superficial level.  The Wolverine looked like it was composed of three different scripts all smooshed together in a magical trash compactor that couldn’t discern good from bad.

It’s unfortunate, but The Wolverine is just another mediocre super hero flick.  The acting was actually somewhat impressive - the best I’ve seen Hugh Jackman do thus far, in fact.  The action was hit-or-miss, mostly miss.  I liked some of it, but the sloppy camerawork during most of the action scenes, not to mention the rather arbitrary way they were set up and executed (as if they wrote the action scenes before they wrote the script itself) eventually left me bored and by the time the movie got back to the story I was uncaring.

Rotten Tomatoes scores the film at a 68/72%, which I would say is pretty spot on.  It’s just sad that this was Fox’s big attempt to revive interest in the X-Men world.  Let’s hope they do a lot better with X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Photo Credits -           

The Wolverine courtesy of imore.com