The Wolverine isn't the best there is at what it does, but what it does is perfectly serviceable.
Bryan Singer's X-Men ushered in the age of the serious comic book movie in 2000 (and its sequel, X2, remains one of the best entries in the genre), but recent years haven't been so kind to Marvel's merry mutants.
Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand didn't seem to please anyone, writing the series into a corner by killing or incapacitating a stack of important characters. Its follow-up, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was an unmitigated disaster, and should have been enough to kill director Gavin Hood's career. (Thankfully, his next movie is Ender's Game, meaning he'll be ruining the work of an author who actually deserves it.)
X-Men: First Class marked something of a comeback in 2011, but it was a prequel set in the '60s that didn't feature most of the core characters — while it proved fruitful to explore the franchise's past, the future remained a dead end. Next year's Days Of Future Past (which will unite the First Class with the cast of the original trilogy) looks like a winner, but something had to be done about all that unsightly wreckage from The Last Stand first. That's where The Wolverine steps in.
Billed as an adaptation of Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's Wolverine comics from the '80s, The Wolverine is... well, it's not that. Instead, it's a salvage job, designed to get the franchise up off the operating table, put the toys back where they belong and clear a path for Bryan Singer's triumphant return in 2014. That director James Mangold, creative force Hugh Jackman and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie, Scott Frank and Mark Bomback have managed to craft a very solid Wolverine movie out of that brief is a bonus.
And they have crafted a very solid Wolverine movie. Mangold is a workmanlike director in the best sense of the term; he rarely delivers a dud (looking at you here, Knight And Day) and he's capable of tricking you, for extended periods of time, into thinking he might be a great director. There are a few sequences here that rank among the best in any superhero film, particularly an absolutely stunning fight scene atop a bullet train that ranks as the year's best bit of action choreography. (It's only some occasionally dodgy wirework — an unfortunate staple of the franchise — that hurts the film on the action front.)
Mangold's approach to the material positions The Wolverine as more of a lone vigilante film, something evocative of Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson's more violent efforts, than a traditional superhero flick; more pulp than pop, though there are also a few genuine, unforced laughs to be had. We also get a satisfying portrayal of Wolverine's struggle with his inner demons after the events of The Last Stand, almost — almost — justifying the existence of that film in the first place.
Of course, it never strays too far from its comic book roots - there aren't many Eastwood flicks that end with Clint fighting a Samurai Transformer (Any Which Way But Loose was the exception that proved the rule).
Said Transformer is indicative of one of the film's big failings, at least from a purist's point of view, and it's something the X-movies have long struggled with — the new characters introduced here bear almost no resemblance to their comic book counterparts. That wouldn't be a bad thing if the changes didn't seem to run counter to what Mangold is trying to do with the rest of the movie.
Rather than taking the Chris Nolan route and rejigging the characters to suit his more 'realistic' world, Mangold (or a Fox studio exec) has populated his otherwise dark, brooding film with a handful of characters that are even more ridiculous than the source material dicates.
Silver Samurai, simply a dude in samurai armour with fairly limited mutant powers in the comics, is a giant freakin' robot here. Viper, a terrorist with no superpowers, now possesses a motley grab bag of mutant abilities, including the ability to shed her skin just like a viper you see what they did there. Yukio, a reckless ninja with a deathwish and no mutant abilities, is still the baddest bitch in Japan, but she can see the future now. The changes are, frankly, inexplicable, and don't really add enough to the story to justify the strangeness of their inclusion.
(On a similar note, The Hand — the ninja clan from Claremont and Miller's comics — aren't called The Hand anymore, but I suspect that's either a rights issue or a desire to avoid confusion with The Foot, the parody from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that became more famous than what it was referencing.)
Even Wolverine's powers are shakily defined — in particular, nobody on the writing staff seems to know where he derives his healing factor from. (Hint: It ain't the adamantium, bub.) I'm not a big fan of the plot point that sees Wolverine losing said healing factor, either, both because it seems like a rehash of The Last Stand's mutant cure and because he seems to learn nothing from the experience — rather than saying, "man, I walk directly into gunfire and let myself get shot a lot, maybe I should not do that", he simply gets his powers back before he's forced to achieve anything without them.
That said, I can handle a film that interprets a few C-grade characters strangely, and even gets Wolverine's powers wrong, as long as it gets Wolverine's character right, and this movie absolutely does that. The character Hugh Jackman plays in this film is recognisably Wolverine, the guy from the comics and the guy from the Bryan Singer movies, the guy we haven't seen for a while. This isn't necessarily the film Wolverine fans have been waiting for, but it's certainly not a bad substitute.
The film X-Men fans are waiting for comes next year, of course — make sure you stick around for the end credits.
★★★ 1/2
