With the X-franchise apparently reinvigorated by First Class, Fox looked to shake off the poor reception of its initial ‘origins’ film and have another crack at a Wolverine solo outing. Director James Mangold would eventually take the helm after numerous delays involving the departure of another director and earthquakes in Japan. But Greg D. Smith wonders if the director of Girl, Interrupted and 3:10 to Yuma could give the franchise and the fans the Wolverine film they needed…

Overcome with grief at having killed Jean Grey in the events of The Last Stand, Logan lives alone in the wilderness, determined never to kill again. But a face from the past triggers a series of events that will awaken the beast within once more.

 

As places to set your opening scene in a comic book action movie go, it’s difficult to think of anything more potentially loaded than a Nazi prison camp. Unless you’re James Mangold of course, in which case you set it on the outskirts of Nagasaki in 1945 as the atomic bomb is dropped there. Visually and thematically, it’s a bold statement of intent – where Origins confined its historical dalliance to a brief opening credits montage, this film sets itself square in the middle of this one event. It also makes the interesting choice of having Logan not only be a prisoner of the Japanese, but actively rescue one of them from certain death. It represents a shift from the more basic, black and white depiction of war in the previous film to something altogether more human. It does make me wonder how on earth anyone was able to catch him though.

Regardless, fast forward to the present day and Logan is living alone in the middle of nowhere, racked with guilt for having killed Jean Grey, the woman he apparently loved, and having sworn he will never kill again. This is where the movie slides into slightly easier, more predictable territory, which in fairness is in keeping with the franchise. My issue is, how do we know that Logan loves Jean? Sure, he has a crush on her pretty much on sight. He flirts with her a lot. They certainly have a spark. But love? Even granting that perhaps we didn’t see all the time they spent together on screen, there was never a suggestion that anything approaching love would have had chance to develop. Infatuation at best. But, having conveniently had Logan forget his great love from his first solo movie with a bullet made of pure adamantium, I guess Mangold felt he needed a woman to hang that part of the plot from.

Of course, the wilderness peacenik version of Logan lasts as long as it takes him to find a grizzly that’s been shot with a poisoned arrow. And then that conflict leads him to meet female protagonist number one for the move – Yukio. A precognitive mutant who can see how people die and also a skilled martial artist. Yukio has a stab at being an actual three-dimensional character. To the screenplay’s credit, there is never any hint of romantic interest between her and Logan (or any other character) and she does get to have some backstory and character exposition, though development was still a shade too far for the era. Rila Fukushima is a charismatic screen presence with a natural talent, and she does get some great action scenes to do, but the screenplay never really feels like it’s interested in deploying her properly beyond her use as a plot device. She’s the one who finds Logan and takes him to Japan, she’s the one who gets to explain things to him, and she’s the one that gets to look sad about him risking his life. Frustratingly, there’s hints of a deeper story to be told about her relationship to other characters in the story, but again the screenplay doesn’t have (or make) time for it.

That’s still better than what we get from Tao Okamoto’s Mariko though, who has the most dissonant role in the film. On the one hand, she’s extremely important. She’s the granddaughter of Ichiro Yashida, the man whose life Logan saved at Nagasaki. Now she stands to inherit her grandfather’s tech empire, over the head of her father. We also see hints that she’s self-sufficient, incredibly strong willed, and capable of handling herself in a fight. What’s odd then, is that having given her this setup, the film’s plot insists on making her a passive object. She’s fought over by servants of her grandfather and of her father. She’s kidnapped. She’s rescued. She falls into bed with Logan after we’ve learned that she’s engaged to a corrupt government official in a deal brokered by her father for his own ends. Despite giving us every narrative reason to believe that Mariko is a strong, competent character, the screenplay gives her almost nothing active to do. The exceptions being her opening appearance in which she tries to throw herself off a cliff, and the climax of the third act when she stabs her grandfather to death with Wolverine’s removed claws. Sure, the film ends with her having assumed control of the company, but it might have been nice to have either given her more to do or let the screenplay spend more time with Yukio.

The main issue the film suffers though, is that it clearly has one thematic idea at its core and then adds a lot more fluff to try and flesh out a movie. That core conceit – what if Logan was robbed of his healing ability – is made to stretch out through a large chunk of the movie. Chiefly, one suspects it’s done so that we can at least have our protagonist be challenged. After all, there’s always the spectre of the ‘Superman problem’ with the character – if he’s unkillable and indestructible, how do you give him stakes? Additionally, the (apparent) great love of his life is dead (by his own hand no less) so there’s no way of threatening the ones he cares about without giving him new ones.

But it’s in the construction of a narrative around that where the film starts to creak. It had been several years since I watched the movie but I could have confidently told you that it was about a guy Wolverine once saved wanting his healing ability. I could have further told you it took place in Japan, there was lots of fighting against Yakuza and ninjas, and the old guy was in a robot suit at the end. The rest of it – which makes up a good portion of the film – is so convoluted, detailed and dull as to be totally forgotten. There’s the main plot of Yashida’s desire to get healing factor to cure himself. Then he dies. The screenplay gives us no reason to doubt this – the reveal of him being alive and orchestrating events behind the scenes is a genuine surprise because the film never once hints at it. Instead, it spends most of the second and third act concentrating on the drama and manoeuvring over his affairs after his ‘death’. The fact Mariko stands to inherit everything. Her father’s ire at this, not just because he will lose out but because the old man had literally run the company into the ground. There’s Yakuza, Ninjas, corrupt government officials, the creepy scientist who had been tending to Yashida snr and is a mutant with poison powers. All are sort of blended in a confusing melange of plot which never quite makes sense when you stop to try to think about it. But then all are basically devices for making sure that Hugh Jackman gets plenty of cool set pieces in which to take part.

And make no mistake, those set pieces do the business. Fighting atop a speeding bullet train is a particular highlight although there are quite a few more. Jackman really sells not just the fury of Wolverine but also the pain. There’s genuine weight to the fights and to the punishment that the character takes through most of the film. Even when he recovers his healing powers, it never loses that sense of vulnerability which was so absent from pretty much every other appearance of the character to date. So well does Mangold manage ‘mortal’ Wolverine that I found myself actively rooting for him to go back to being the invulnerable badass. And when he does go back, I’m still rooting for him because he’s still up against it. The scene where he tries to escape the ninjas and ends up stuck by dozens of arrows is delightfully subversive. The setup is there for a standard ‘Wolverine murders a succession of faceless villains’ scene and then the film just goes in a different direction altogether.

The attempt at exploration of Logan’s psychological fragility in the movie is a brave idea, even though the movie never quite manages to elevate itself to the level at which it might reasonably be assumed to have been aiming. Perhaps what’s saddest of all is that I’m fairly certain Famke Janssen gets more dialogue in this film as the occasionally appearing ghost of Jean Grey than she got in the entirety of the original trilogy.

Here, Jean’s ‘ghost’ represents Logan’s guilt both at what he did to her, the kind of person he is overall, and his desire to just lay down and die so he can achieve some peace. It feels like a genuine attempt at examining the trauma of the character rather than just exploiting his man-pain at the loss of a woman, but unfortunately it doesn’t quite land for three main reasons. The first is that as I’ve stated already, this attempt by the script to re-cast a bit of flirting and infatuation as a love affair to rival Romeo and Juliet just doesn’t ring true.

The second is that it then steps into the James Bondian style cliché of having our hero fall into bed with a young woman in danger. When Mariko and Logan do end up in that situation, it doesn’t feel as if it’s for any organic or believable reason. To that point they haven’t enjoyed any particular closeness of the type that would suggest romance, and once it’s done, there’s no real suggestion of it ever happening again. Mainly it feels as if it’s jammed in there rather awkwardly so that Logan can have another ‘conversation’ with ‘Jean’ about it. Thirdly, the concept of a man who wants to die when they are unable to be hurt and basically indestructible is a difficult sell. Unfortunately, Mangold takes the opportunity of a shortcut in ‘because he’s sad that his girl died’. Except of course, she wasn’t his girl, but never mind because before you have time to consider that, Mangold has another action scene in the hopper ready to go.

And that’s the issue with the film in the round – it feels as if it tilts at a lot of interesting ideas, but always shies away from fully exploring then in favour of the same sort of action movie clichés we have already seen a hundred times in the genre. It confuses convolution of plot and many different villains pursuing their own, often unimportant agendas with depth. On the other hand, it’s shot very nicely, making good use of the various locales of Japan in which it’s set, and containing what was – at the time – some of the most brutal, visceral fight scenes in the franchise.

I recall seeing The Wolverine at the cinema, and coming away with one scene having stuck in my mind: the mid credits sting, with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen’s Xavier and Magneto arriving to speak to Wolverine at an airport. Everything about that scene intrigued me, and felt more enticing than the entirety of the two hour movie which preceded it. On this re-watch, with the benefit of hindsight, that feels harsh. That said, it’s easier for me to now see why I felt that way. The Wolverine is pretty, Jackman is solid as its lead, and it delivers as a standard slice of popcorn action. But there’s nothing in it which really lands, no single scene that stays with you after the credits roll. Considering some of the themes it hints at, that’s a disappointment. It’s not a bad movie by any stretch, but it feels like it could have been a much better one.