My review of the 2009 film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was obliterated when multiply.com shut down its blogging section, and perhaps it's only fitting that it's gone forever considering how awful I found that movie to be.
Four years later, Twentieth Century Fox, one of the only two studios left aside from Disney that has the rights to make movies based on characters taken from Marvel Comic books, appears to have learned its lesson and has come out with a movie that is substantially better than what came before it, this time simply titled: The Wolverine.
The film opens with a flashback in which the mutant Logan, also known as the Wolverine (played again by Hugh Jackman) is trapped in a prisoner-of-war camp in Nagasaki, moments before the atom bomb is dropped. With the bomb about to drop, Yashida (Ken Yamamura) a young Japanese officer decides to set the prisoners free. Because there is nowhere to run, the Japanese officers commit ritual suicide, but the young officer, Yashida, cannot bring himself to do it as he watches the bomb's catastrophic explosion. In that moment, Logan saves Yashida by throwing him into the hole in which he was imprisoned, which turns out to be the safest place to be, and covers him with a metal plate and his own body. While the blast basically flays Logan, his mutant healing gift restores his skin right before an astonished Yashida's eyes.
Decades later, and after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan lives as a hermit in the Yukon, his only friend apparently a large bear. When some local hunter kills the bear using an illegal poisoned arrow, Logan follows him to the bar and is about to lay waste to him and his companions when a mysterious Japanese girl named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) brandishing a katana and some serious skill intervenes, telling him that an old acquaintance of Logan wants to say goodbye to him in person. That old acquaintance turns out to be a dying Yashida (now played by Haruhiko Yamanouchi), who has, since Logan saved him back in the war, built an empire based on technology, and who basically asks Logan to give him his healing factor. Logan declines, but having set foot on Yashida's premises, with a shady doctor (Svetlana Khodchenkova) and Yashida's power-hungry son (Hiroyuki Sanada) basically just waiting for the old man to expire, Wolverine soon finds out that he is already in over his head. Before he knows it, he is on the run with Yashida's fetching granddaughter Mariko (the statuesque Tao Okamoto) from mysterious forces whose true motivation will shock him (though not necessarily the audience).
While the quality of this film is not exactly on par with other Marvel notables like the first couple of X-Men or Spider-Man movies, the first Iron Man movie or last year's global box-office phenomenon The Avengers, it is a substantial improvement over the first Wolverine movie, which was so unabashedly idiotic that it had the lead villain thinking he could erase Wolverine's memory by shooting him in the head with an adamantium bullet, and even worse, actually being right.
Loosely based on a 1982 mini-series by noted comic-book creators Chris Claremont (X-Men) and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns), this film explores Wolverine's character more than any of the other films in the X-Men series, even though the majority of them were already arguably Wolvie-centric, but more importantly, actually gives him dimension this time around. Here, he grapples with regret, desire, and later, fear. Sure, he's still Marvel's resident loner, but at least here, there's more to him that growling, howling, and his adamantium claws. Full credit for this turnaround goes to director James Mangold and his screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, and, of course, to Hugh Jackman, whose earnestness almost elevated X-Men Origins: Wolverine past the utter schlock that it was. Here, his utter commitment to this role shows again, from his straight-faced line delivery, even when the film jumps off the rails in the third act, to his ridiculously ripped physique.
Fortunately, Jackman isn't on his own here; his supporting cast, made up mostly of Japanese actors, are, as strange as this may sound, more effective in their roles than a lot of the X-Men actors were in their supposed ensemble piece. Supermodel Okamoto, obviously cast so that the 6'2 Jackman wouldn't look too much bigger than his leading lady, surprises in her role as Wolverine's love interest Mariko, especially considering this is her first-ever feature film role. Veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada does well with limited screen time as Mariko's dad Shingen, as do Yamanouchi and Korean-American actor Will Yun Lee with their roles.
For me, though, the real standout was Fukushima as Yukio. Like Okamoto, Fukushima is a model starring in her first feature film, but as a rather plucky action heroine, she's quite a find. I hope she doesn't end up in direct-to-video limbo after this; she deserves a heck of a lot better in my opinion.
A lot of reviewers have complained about how the film collapses in the third act, and truth be told, it does, but to be honest, the overall plot really isn't the movie's strong point, as it was basically designed to end up there in the first place. I will agree with them that Khodchenkova's Viper brings the film dangerously close to some of the low points of the last solo Wolvie pic, but the good news is that the movie has too much else going for it to let some moments of stupidity drag it down. The action set pieces are pretty impressive at times, and Wolverine's battle with Yakuza thugs atop a speeding train is quite easily a highlight. It is worth pointing that not all the fight scenes are all that good, though.
Whatever the film's flaws, though, there was nothing even approaching the stupidity of the memory-erasing bullet from the first Wolverine solo picture, and in any event, I was able to forgive the movie its various flaws after watching the nigh-obligatory, but this time positively tantalizing post-credits scene.
3.5/5
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