Movie Review: The Wolverine

The Wolverine (2013)

When Wolverine is summoned to Japan by an old acquaintance, he is embroiled in a conflict that forces him to confront his own demons.  Short synopsis of The Wolverine taken from IMDb.com

You know, I actually didn't hate this movie.  I thought I would at the most take pity on it, but no.  I thought the juxtaposition of martial arts Asian film with the mutants of X-Men would be a weird mix, but The Wolverine actually didn't come off too bad here.  Sure, it was predictable.  When the little red-headed future-seeing Japanese girl (Logan's bodyguard, she styled herself) said that she hadn't foreseen the old man's death, it was obvious he was gonna end up being a bad guy.  Had he not been?  Now THAT would have been a surprise, and a really decent red-herring.  But then it didn't come off as too much of a "oh please" moment when he was revealed, so it turned out OK.

I did get a bit lost in the bad guys and semi-bad guys in the plot.  Partly this is due to not a close watching of the film.  I also didn't like the subtitles.  I get the impression, based on something I recently read, that Hollywood is going after the Asian market and catering more to their tastes, and if The Wolverine falls into that region of shameless market grabbing, it would explain why the subtitles were so damn small, and the dialogue (in Japanese) was so quickly delivered.  You had to be on the edge of your seat to catch a few of the exchanges.  Of course I wasn't, so I missed things.  But were they important things?  Not that I could tell, to be honest.

You too can look like a ninja, even if you don't have "da skillz."  Pretty cool.  I'd have got out the sewing thread and sewed up a thing to look somewhat ninja-esque, but the young lady shows a quick way to do it.
 

I also vaguely recall reading somebody who was griping about how Marvel was re-writing X-Men canon to serve their interests, with the example being Logan and Jean Grey's numerous dream-sequence interactions in The Wolverine.  I personally didn't hate this.  He loves her, she visits him (really visits or not, you decide) and they interact in ways that suggest quite well the inner desire Logan has to actually be a normal person.  This thread of the plot didn't bug me too much.  The whole "Wolverine wants to be normal" thing.  Yes, it may have been overdone a bit. Just the same, this movie was more of a comic book come to the big screen, and thus it seemed to hold to a continuity of story that other nicely gift-wrapped plots sometimes miss.  You got a new refreshing idea thrown into a well founded storyline, and in the end, nothing of superlative importance has happened to wreck the character or the underlying plot.  It was a nice aside, I suppose you could say.

Even The Wolverine's numerous fight scenes didn't distract to much.  Didn't feel tacked on.  They felt as if, with a few exceptions, they were going somewhere.  So many movies seem just to like to hear themselves roar.  Elysium, I'm looking in your direction.  Hell, I could be looking at half the summer blockbusters of recent years, and then some.  But you get the idea.

Was this scene int he movie?  I don't remember, but I wish it had been.  That would have been so sweet.  Wolverine... with a bunch of katana swords sticking out of him...  looking all mad....  he'd probably say something like: "Urrr!  Ahhh...  GraaaaAAAAHHHHH!!!!"  And then show his big sharp claws and like that.  He's not a man of many words, don't ya know.  / Source: marvel.com

In the end, The Wolverine was worth the Redbox rental.  I'd have been disappointed in a full price theater price, and a little so as well in a cheap seats ticket showing.  I enjoyed watching The Wolverine, albeit in a distracted sort of way.  No, I wouldn't probably watch it again.  But neither would I turn away in disgust if I saw it come up on an accidental viewing while I was out and about - say at the local plasma donation center, where I see - from time to time - movies I'd just as likely wish to completely forget I ever saw.  Because they are so dumb.  But that's a whole different story. 

Wolverine (the character), you're hanging in there despite all the plots Hollywood keeps throwing your way.  Bravo.

The parting comment:


Hugh Jackman, star of The Wolverine, also did Les Miserables that same year.  BBCRadio got him to sing a song from that film, but with words changed to suit his role as part of the X-Men.