Runtime: 2 hours, 6 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: James Mangold
Quick Impressions:
Originally we weren’t planning to go to a movie this weekend.
All summer long, both kids have repeatedly expressed interest in Turbo, but we missed it the first weekend because of our vacation and didn’t want to take our four-year-old this weekend because her brother couldn’t join us.
I didn’t think she would be interested in The Wolverine. Apparently, I was wrong. After watching a preview this afternoon, my daughter decided that in fact she would love to see The Wolverine. A four-year-old girl may not seem like the ideal audience for a dark action movie about one of the most tormented comic book heroes ever, but the thing is, right now she is obsessed with Japan, Japanese culture, martial arts, and pretty much everything that reminds her of the anime and manga that she loves. (At this moment, in fact, she has conned us all into watching Fruits Basket, a show about a family cursed to turn into the animals of the Chinese zodiac every time they’re hugged by a member of the opposite sex.) Until my daughter developed her recent passion, I had never read any manga and hadn’t watched too much anime, so she’s definitely broadening my horizons. I must admit, her curiosity about The Wolverine made me much more excited to see it myself.
To be honest, I went to this film with less than zero expectations. Most of the big movies I’ve been excited about this summer have already come and gone. (Despite a number of potentially cool films still to come, I’m only really looking forward to The World’s End and Fruitvale Station.)
Action films aren’t always my thing, and Wolverine has never been my favorite character. He’s so dark and brooding. That’s not what I want from a super
hero. If I want dramatic, brooding mood-swings and out of control hair, I can just spend a couple of hours alone and save the price of a movie ticket.
Even though I love Hugh Jackman, as far as X-Men go, I’m really only interested in Magneto. Honestly, I’d be perfectly happy to watch Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart play chess for two hours. I’m also quite drawn to Michael Fassbender Magneto. A movie of him walking purposefully to a driven bassline would probably work for me, too.
But I have to say The Wolverine pleasantly surprised me. Plot wise, it’s not exactly full of surprises, but it definitely has a solid story, thoughtful, well-choreographed action sequences, interesting characters, good performances, decent dialogue, some lovely staging, and a score by Marco Beltrami that I really enjoyed. My husband also liked it way more than he expected. And my four-year-old announced afterward that it had edged out Wreck-It Ralph as her third favorite movie.
The Good:
Recently (very recently) I’ve noticed an encouraging trend. Action movies seem to be picking up more and more legitimately interesting female characters. This movie features three fairly interesting and reasonably complex characters. As my daughter pointed out, Wolverine is “the star,” so nobody gets as much time as he does.
Plus the entirety of the story going on around Wolverine is really a reflection of his interior development. So yeah, there’s no way the other characters are going to get anywhere near the amount of development Logan does. But The Wolverine still gives us more in the female department than a couple of pretty faces.
Watching The Wolverine today and Pacific Rim earlier this month has left me with the distinct impression that in Japan, courageous, virtuous, loyal
female children are usually found loitering near dumpsters in big cities, readily available for pick-up, adoption, and grooming for the ultimate revenge.
In terms of origins, Yukio (played by the highly compelling Rila Fukushima) has quite a lot in common with Pacific Rim’s Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi). All told, Mako probably gets more development, but Yukio is used with more grace and less grandstanding. Unlike Mako, she doesn’t completely highjack the whole story. In The Wolverine, we always focus first and foremost on Hugh Jackman as Logan. Still, apart from Jackman, Yukio is definitely the most compelling character, quite interesting in her own right with quite a bit of sequel or even spin off potential.
It’s quite refreshing for an action movie to give us a loyal sidekick who is female but not a love interest or sex object. Yukio has sort of a shady Wuthering Heightsy kind of backstory, and the film incorporates this history without dwelling on it. Is Yukio also a mutant? That’s not completely clear (at least, it’s not resolved to my satisfaction), but she’s definitely interesting enough to go toe-to-toe with mutants and hold her own.
She also has a very cinematic face and knows just when to pause, just how to smile. Her lingering gazes are more dramatic than the entire oeuvre of many a lesser playwright. And her red hair looks cool, too. (Just ask my daughter.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen Fukushima in anything else, and this is not the kind of part that allows her to show off tremendous range. But I’m definitely curious about her future performances.
The Wolverine is very generous with its women. Instead of just offering us Yukio, it also gives us Mariko (Tao Okamoto). Too often in summer popcorn flicks like this, we’re given one token woman. It’s a rare thing to get more than one sympathetic woman, and practically a miracle to get more than one sympathetic Japanese woman. (Movies like this often take pains to dole out a measured number of stock characters. To give large, feature parts to two non-Western women with such completely different personalities and then to have neither of them play the villain is practically unheard of in a Hollywood popcorn affair.) Clearly, Yukio is the glitzier, more romantic/exciting character, but Mariko has plenty of appeal, too. She’s by far the more classically beautiful of the two. But as I watched the character develop on screen, I was pleased to discover that just because Mariko is beautiful, desired, and good, she’s not some kind of lifeless cipher with no personality of her own. In fact, I think her backstory is perhaps the most fascinating one in the entire film simply because when told from her point of view, the story jumps genre and becomes a fairy tale (complete with fairy tale ending).
And while we’re on the subject of women, Dr. Poison Breath (or as she’s called in the cast list Viper) is also increasingly compelling. At first, I wrote her off as the typical sort-of-attractive-yet-vacuous blonde not played by a major star who often shows up as a minor character in a movie like this. But she was more than that. The story isn’t about her origins, where she came from, who she really is, but still, as the movie unfolds, we’re able to
learn a staggering amount about her just by how she behaves while she’s onscreen. She says some terribly interesting things and does stuff like pull all the old skin off her face. She’s definitely a curiosity, and the actress is very striking with an incredible charisma. At the beginning, I didn’t like her (mainly because of her sort of laying-it-on-too-thick Southern accent). My husband thought she was strangely attractive. By the end, however, he thoroughly despised her and I was half in love with her (though she’s hideous). Svetlana Khodchenkova turned out to be a much stronger actress than her first brief scene led me to expect. She also turned out to be Russian which makes me hopeful for the future. (I’d like to hear her real voice. I didn’t care for her faked accent, though it wasn’t horrible.)
Though not given as much screentime as Wolverine’s leading ladies, some of the men are quite interesting, too, particularly Will Yun Lee as Harada and Hal Yamanouchi who is something else as Yashida.
Beyond the interesting characters, what I appreciated most was the thoughtful script. The themes of the movie were incredibly obvious. Yet despite the complete lack of subtlety, I thought the movie still conveyed its main ideas with artful elegance. I especially loved the way practically everyone/thing seemed to be a double for Wolverine, and then Wolverine himself was also a kind of double for everyone else. To give just one example, early on, there’s a very pointed comparison (even highlighted by explicit dialogue) between Wolverine and the wounded bear. Basically the whole story that happens around Wolverine is a dramatization for the struggles and realizations going on inside Wolverine. And then later, we also get the idea that Wolverine himself is some kind of metaphor for the eternally restorative power of nature. Wolverine’s body heals just like Japan after the nuclear blasts in World War II, just like the earth itself after years of pollution and abuse, just like every single human soul, refined by ordeal.
The movie also works hard to make the audience pay attention to all its symbolism (even the visual symbolism). Because Mariko makes a pointed comment about the position of Logan’s chopsticks, we are sure to pay extra close attention to everything the movie shows us, to look for meaning in each and every beautifully staged scene.
I really liked Marco Beltrami’s score, too (especially the main theme that played during the credits). I found it refreshingly non-invasive. Some of the musical themes this summer have been excruciatingly overwhelming. Funnily enough, when I saw the name in the end credits, I cried, “Marco Beltrami? Didn’t he also score 3:10 to Yuma?” He did (and he also scored like a million other movies), but only when I looked it up to confirm did I discover that The Wolverine’s director James Mangold also directed the remake of 3:10 to Yuma (a film I was surprised to enjoy). (I always associate Mangold with Walk the Line. I had completely forgotten that he did 3:10 to Yuma. I guess he works with Beltrami a lot. I’m glad he did this time. I like the results.)
Best Scene:
I’m torn here. I’m a huge fan of the funeral scene, particularly what happens afterwards with Will Yun Lee.
Personally, I think my favorite part was the bit when one person with evil designs was surprised by a second group with even more calculating evil designs. I’m a sucker for Ninjas. (Watching, I remembered with a smile that when my stepson was my daughter’s age, he would often dress up as “an inja.”)
I also sort of liked the part that ended with the swimming pool. After the movie, my husband noted that he often felt sucked into the intensity of Logan’s swelling rages, and my daughter chimed in that she felt like that, too. (And I know she did because she cheered whenever any bad guy got his comeuppance.)
Best Scene Visually:
When Wolverine decides to “come and get her” at the end, he arrives at such a pretty place. The snowy scene is nice enough while innocuous,
but it gets even better once the archers show up. Wolverine trying to walk forward is definitely the iconic image dominating the movie. (Of course, I think this lovely scene could easily have been shown up (to positive effect) by an earlier scene in the lab, but I’ll say more about that later.)
Another great moment visually comes in the flashback scene, just after Wolverine has saved Yashida. The look on Ken Yamamura’s face is priceless.
Funniest Scene:
The choice of rooms in the “love hotel” definitely made me smile, and the subsequent scene involving the wary vet really amused me and several other people. Also throughout the film, whenever Wolverine displayed his trademark brash refusal to take guff, everybody in the theater started laughing. To the movie’s credit, it did not play up these moments for over the top comedy, and wandering down that perilous path by mistake would have been awfully easy.
Best Action Sequence:
This summer, I’ve seen more than my share of fights atop moving trains, but The Wolverine’s is particularly well executed. I often get lost in action scenes, but since I’ve started writing reviews, I’ve begun paying close enough attention to note whether a movie uses smart action or thoughtless action. There’s definitely lots of careful thought behind the action in The Wolverine, and the fight atop the train takes full advantage of what my daughter reported to my sister when asked about the movie, “The Wolverine is the one with the claws.”
The final showdown is pretty exhilarating, too, especially all of Viper’s creepy antics.
The Negatives:
Famke Janssen is great and all. In college, my roommate was a wealth of information about her, and she seems like a nice person, a lovely woman, a good actress. I can totally understand the appeal of zoning out and imagining yourself in bed with her whenever life gets you down, but such a set-up doesn’t exactly create a wonderful part for her. Janssen is the most established actress in The Wolverine, and she has by far the least to do.
Don’t get me wrong. I like that we see Jean Grey. I like that she still occupies a special space on the fringes of Logan’s consciousness. I suppose that, for the most part, it even makes sense that we see her lying around in a sunlit bed. And when you consider that Jean Grey is dead, Janssen’s part is actually astonishingly substantial. I mean, it’s pretty great when you’re playing somebody who died before the thing ever started, and yet you keep showing up throughout the entire movie.
But for whatever reason, this repetitive device of drowsy conversations with Jean began to annoy me a bit as the film dragged on. Don’t ask me why. On paper, it should work. Logan’s dreamy conversations with Jean while in an altered state are a good way of dramatizing his ongoing torment about her complicated death for the screen. But when there are so many vibrant, powerful, compelling female characters up walking around doing actual stuff, Jean gradually begins to pale by comparison. I suppose that’s the point. Logan needs to move on, to continue to live. Still, I guess the issue is that while Janssen’s scenes (taken as a whole) are effective, they are not particularly enjoyable. Logan is torn between really dark, gritty action on the streets of a Japan that has recovered from devastation and astonishingly bright, drowsy meditations on a gleaming white bed where nothing ever happens. I know that it’s a visual representation of his initial yearning for and later rejection of death, but I just didn’t have fun watching those Jean Grey scenes and no amount of indulgent analysis can change that.
Also, I know this movie was fighting for a PG-13, and (as someone whose very young child wanted to see it), I appreciate that. But I think with an R rating, certain parts of the movie might have been better. One scene in particular felt like a bit of a cheat. Yukio tells Wolverine about a moment from his future that she has foreseen.
She describes it so vividly, preparing us to experience it as a reality. When the scene finally arrives, it loses quite a bit of its potential power because of its refusal (or rating-crippled inability) to show us full on the dramatic scene Yukio earlier described. It’s like this momentous, memorable scene is happening in front of us, but we’re never really allowed to get a good look at it. This could (and probably should) have been the most iconic moment of the entire movie, but (probably to dodge an R rating) it never gets fully realized on camera.
Also, I hope the ending “twist” is intended more as dramatic irony (something we know all along that Logan does not) and not a surprise because there’s absolutely nothing surprising about it at all. Very, very, very early on we’re given a pretty emphatic (and decisive) clue about what’s actually going on. We should know right then what’s really going on. Hopefully the movie is aware that we’re in on its big secret. I guess it really doesn’t matter, though, either way.
Sometimes, too, I thought the movie worked better on an intellectual level than as simple entertainment. It’s definitely got something to say, and some of its implications are quite profound. But as an action movie, it’s limited, formulaic, and not exactly innovative.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty good summer popcorn flick, but this is the sort of film that will easily prompt long, involved discussions far more interesting and exciting than the movie itself.
Overall:
By far my favorite part of The Wolverine is the scene that takes place during the credits. Suddenly I got really excited to see Days of Future Past next year (although I still don’t know how they’re going to cram so many people into one roughly two hour movie. I hope the film editor is a mutant, too, or else it’s all going to be a big train wreck).
Still I must admit that I actually enjoyed The Wolverine, and I didn’t particularly expect to. Action movies aren’t my thing. Wolverine is not my character. And yet this movie entertained me for its entire runtime with its intriguing script, captivating characters, solid performances, and carefully crafted scenes. I also loved Marco Beltrami’s score (mainly because it wasn’t self-impressed or bombastic like so many other scores I’ve heard this summer).
If you like X-Men movies (but aren’t too hung up on adaptations remaining faithful to the comics), then you should enjoy The Wolverine, too. It was better than I expected.