Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tao Okamato, Rila Fukushima, Ken Yamamura, Famke Janssen, Will Yun Lee, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Haruhiko Yamanouchi, Brian Tee.
The Wolverine has barely got going when perhaps one of the most explosive and thought provoking starts to a film ever hits the screen. From that point on, the film is exactly what you want from a motion picture depicting one of Marvel’s most loved characters, it is also exactly what you expect to get with just a few fine touches to separate it from the X-Men origins film which now seems lacklustre and filmed in a fairly half-hearted and to set up the next instalment of Marvel’s mutant team.
No matter how many times you have heard or read about the dropping of the most destructive bomb in recorded history at the time on Nagasaki, the abundance of eye-witness accounts that are in historical records or even been fortunate enough to touch a statue that survived the blast, nothing will ever seem to be as vivid as the silence and dread an audience member felt as they realised what they were seeing was history from the ground up. If the cinema can be so immense in its stature, so magnificent in capturing a moment of time that not only changed the world but nearly destroyed it in what is effectively a comic book film, then there will always be hope for the medium.
The Woverine sees Logan/Wolverine hiding away from civilization as he tries to recover from the loss of Jean Gray, the irreplaceable Famke Janssen and his subsequent reasoning that those around him who he loves will always leave him as they grow old and die as he continues to go on and on throughout eternity, living but as a shell of a man. This seems inevitable till a messenger finds him in a bar and drags him to modern day Japan to say goodbye to a man he once met. From there all the destructive forces on Earth cannot keep Logan from doing the right thing.
Whilst The Wolverine films as stand-alone pieces of art are interesting and in the latest film’s case, visually stunning, they just don’t have the same gravitas as the X-Men films. The humour which is forever linked through all the Marvel spin-off films is missing, yes Logan is brooding, he is the lone wolf who will forever stride alone but even in the most starkest of lives, humour must be found else the audience feels duty bound to empathise with someone who will not return that empathy. The humour that drives all other super heroes together, be it Iron Man, Spider Man or even the members of the Fantastic Four is what gives a film, no matter its message, its true worth.
That said there is a some stirring performances throughout the film, least of all from Hugh Jackman himself who is the epitome of cool as the Adamatium filled hero. Also worthy of being involved is the excellent Rila Fukushima as Yukio and the beautifully poised Tao Okamoto as the heroine Mariko. Both these woman carry the film in directions that echo the male machismo world of Japan but also give it that sense of balance, thinking through a problem rather than hell bent on destruction.
As films go, it is visually stunning; it has the right level of action you would expect and demand from a comic book or graphic novel adaptation, it installs a sense of shared history with its audience but it lacks real heart, it sticks its claws so far into the message of Western man in Eastern society, that it cannot find a way to brink itself back from the edge; that is, right up until the final couple of scenes.
The Wolverine is not the worse ever adaptation but falls a long way short of the incredible X-Men films which started more than a decade ago.
Ian D. Hall