A 'Wolverine' with Dramatic Juice to Spare

by Brett Parker

The Wolverine is perhaps the one film in the X-Men canon that comes closest to being a character drama, maybe even more-so than Bryan Singer’s beginning installment.  Director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) usually favors subtle displays of slow-burn dramatics and applying that method here helps illuminate deeper ideals hidden within one of America’s favorite bad-ass superheroes.  While the final result isn’t exactly the Solaris of Marvel movies (which would be awesome, by the way), it’s still miles more worthwhile than the sugar-high hokiness of Wolverine’s last stand-alone outing.

The film continues the long-winding adventures of Logan, a.k.a “Wolverine,” the immortal mutant warrior whose skeleton is encased in enhanced metal that supplies him with metal claws hidden between his knuckles.  We catch up with Logan some time after he left behind his fellow X-Men mutants and chose to live as a recluse in the Canadian wilderness.  He is still mourning the loss of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), the mutant love of his life, and is mentally tortured by the prospect of everlasting life.  Tracking him in the wilderness is Yukio (Rila Fukushima), an assassin who works for Yashida (Hiroyuki Sanada), a Japanese billionaire who Logan saved from an atomic blast many years ago.  Yashida has requested that Logan come and visit him on his deathbed in Japan.

Logan travels to meet with Yashida and discovers that the dying billionaire wants to repay him for saving his life by giving him the one thing he can’t have for himself: mortality.  Yashida has invested a fortune in medical technology and claims he can extract the immortal genes from Wolverine’s body, leaving him human and able to die in the process.  While Logan considers this offer, a bloody battle ensues around him as corrupt forces fight for control of Yashida’s fortune.  His granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto), is reluctantly at the center of this war, causing Logan to try and fight for her.  But as Wolverine engages in battle, he discovers that his body is growing weaker and not healing like it used to.  Someone or something has infected him and his indestructible nature is slowly dissolving.  Wolverine must struggle to find out what exactly is happening to his body if he hopes to protect Mariko’s life.  

While the uneven X-Men Origins: Wolverine relied on an adolescent comic-book-come-to-life tone, Mangold wisely calls upon Japanese dramas and Western anti-hero tales to craft his Wolverine film.  Not only does this do considerable justice to Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s original Wolverine comic book work, but it also compliments the finer points of the character we cherish so much.  Japanese dramas tend to bring unique focus on honor, loyalty, and devoting oneself to a cause worth fighting for, and these are conflicts that torment Logan deep down even as his disgruntled shell suggests otherwise.  Of course, the Wolverine character has always held a resemblance to a grizzled lone cowboy myth, with his Clint-Eastwood-on-steroids exterior and his strict adherence to personal morals in an uncertain world.  And that ideal has never felt stronger than here since Wolverine is a stranger riding into a strange land to fight villainous forces and protect the innocent simply because it’s the right thing to do.

The most interesting revelation this outing discovers about Wolverine is that when faced with the choice between mortality and immortality, our hero might just lean more towards the latter.  While he’s undoubtedly haunted by the loss of love and wanders around hopelessly in search of a cause, urgency and desperation energize him once he becomes seriously wounded for the very first time.  Whatever pain haunted him earlier in his lonesome travels holds nothing on his newfound fears of physical annihilation and being completely eradicated from his warrior skills.  Although I wish the dialogue reflected the philosophical implications more, the events in this film force Logan to fully realize how his immortal powers can be used to help the powerless and he seems to fully accept his role as an indestructible ronin who’ll forever protect the innocent when need be.  

Of course none of this would feel as compelling if it weren’t for Hugh Jackman’s seasoned talents and movie star magnetism.  While most aspects of the Wolverine character are inherently ridiculous, Jackman’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the hero’s persona, along with his acute sense of haunted alienation, delivers the hyperbolic grandeur this lone wolf cries out for.  While some steps in the X-Men playbook have proven lumpy and downright silly, Jackman is the beacon of incongruent bad-ass humility that keeps pulling us back again-and-again to this mythic world.  Even though it’s dramatic scenes never transcend its pop narrative and it ends up falling hopelessly into blockbuster pratfalls, the film still honors and deepens everything we dig about the superhero and it proves to be worthy of his pop stature.  

Sam Rockwell Will Show You the 'Way'

by Brett Parker

Picture this: you’ve found yourself attending a party that didn’t turn out to be as much fun as you expected.  The affair could be either mind-numbingly boring, much of a muchness, or filled with guests who are too strange or alienating to engage.  Yet just when you’re about to give up all hope for the situation, in walks a fun-loving buddy of yours.  This friend is an energetic and hilarious life-of-the-party who’s just what the doctor ordered.  He’s the kind of person who can surely transform the proceedings into an absolute blast.  That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling about Sam Rockwell at the movies lately.  There have been numerous films recently that were on shaky ground until Rockwell walked in and upped the ante.  He was the one spirited supporting player who wasn’t hindered by diminished screen time in Iron Man 2 and he elevated the uneasy lunacy of Seven Psychopaths to comic gold.  Now with his latest flick, The Way, Way Back, he’s dished out a jolly good performance in familiar mush that is worth the price of admission alone.  Giving a competent performance that adds to an entertaining movie is the mark of a good actor, but catapulting a movie from mediocre to worthwhile is the sign of a real treasure.

The Way, Way Back tells the story of Duncan (Liam James), an unhappy 14-year-old who is forced to spend his summer vacation in the beach house of his mother’s new boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell).  Duncan’s Mom, Pam (Toni Collette), wants her son to give the new man in her life a chance, but Duncan rightfully suspects that Trent is an untrustworthy creep.  Duncan fits the mold of an awkward teenage loner and he doesn’t fit into his newfound summer environment too easily.  It doesn’t take long before Trent’s local beach friends brand the kid as some kind of weirdo.  

Things start looking up once our hero visits Water Wizz, a local water park.  It’s there that he meets Owen (Sam Rockwell), the goofy manager of the park who senses an ocean of loneliness inside Duncan and decides to take him under his wing.  Owen makes him a fellow employee, and pretty soon this laid-back jokester is teaching the kid how to have fun with life and not take everything so seriously.  It turns out that Water Wizz is filled with outsiders and misfits just like Duncan who help him come out of his shell and be more assertive with himself.  Pretty soon, Owen’s care-free jolliness inspires Duncan to rattle things up within his own family, as Trent grows increasingly mean and Pam grows slowly unhappy.  

The Way, Way Back treads familiar grounds with a coming-of-age-in-the-summertime story mixed with a tale of a teenage outcast trying to fit in.  Writer-Directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (Academy Award Winners for their script work on The Descendants) don’t really add any fresh insights to either ideal, but you can’t say it isn’t all handled with delicacy.  The one major strength this tale has is an acute performance by Liam James, whose embodiment of teenage alienation is miles more convincing than most teen actors in this territory.  James conveys lonesome wallflower anguish with such morose, mopish detachment that you realize he’ll be great in serial killer roles when he grows up.  So that’s why this movie really lights up when Duncan learns to open up and enjoy himself more, which is like watching a zombie indulging in a school playground.  Scenes where local kids teach him how to breakdance and Owen assists him in an epic water slide challenge add peculiar uplift and the small, joyous smile Duncan eventually displays in his Employee-of-the-Month photo conveys a genuine and surprising warmth.

As for the supporting players, Faxon and Rash employ the tactic of casting seasoned veterans in smaller roles to help build a sense of realism around their world.  While Allison Janney is able to build a colorful character, the capable Amanda Peet is merely window decoration and the comically gifted Rob Corddry is given no outlet for his humor.  Steve Carell is drummed up simply to be a condescending jerk in the kind of role Greg Kinnear could sleepwalk through, but it’s such a refreshing treat to see Carell playing something other than the self-pitying sad sacks he’s grown an annoying taste for.  It’s just too bad his comic instincts weren’t allowed to chip away at any real depths in his meanie character.

Of course, Rockwell steals the entire show and becomes the main attraction in this enterprise by miles.  Faxon and Rash have stated in interviews that the inspiration for his character came from Bill Murray’s Tripper in Meatballs and it’s a testament to Rockwell that he could go toe-to-toe with Murray on similar comic grounds.  As fast-talking irreverence and zany wisdom pours out of this hipster Yoda, you realize that every word out of his mouth is golden dialogue and the only major laughs in the movie originate from this overgrown frat boy.  Even when it comes time to turn on the sentiment, Rockwell conveys a sneaky sincerity and an inner-weariness that’s touching as he shows just how much affection he actually has for Duncan.  If the rest of the script matched Owen’s manic hilarity and quirky morals, than this movie would’ve been just as dynamite as Rockwell is.

The main lessons we draw from The Way, Way Back tell us to always stand-up for your happiness, even if it doesn’t fit in with the accepted order of things, and how friendship can be the best cure for one’s inner-woes.  These aren’t exactly earth-shattering revelations, nor are they presented in a terribly original package, but they’re very important lessons nonetheless and I welcome being reminded about them on occasion.  The success of this movie is that it earns those lessons, and it’s such a blessing to have Sam Rockwell help deliver them to us.  He’s the shot-of-adrenaline a lot of comedies need these days and I hope his filmography keeps building on his gifts towards something truly awe-inspiring.  

The Loon 'Ranger'

by Brett Parker

It’s pretty obvious that Disney wants to do with The Lone Ranger what it did successfully with Pirates of the Carribean: take a halfway-recognizable brand name attached to a popcorn genre and interject it with an offbeat Johnny Depp performance and all the big-budget blockbuster fixings of our current era.  But while pirate flicks form a B-movie genre no one really thinks too hard about, the western film is one of the most enduring, beloved, and analyzed of all American genres.  So one of the strangest things about this new Lone Ranger is its indecisiveness about whether to honor the innocence of the source material or acknowledge the entire history of true grit westerns that have flourished between then and now.  We can sense the filmmakers trying desperately to bridge the gap between the two opposing ideals, and while the finished film doesn’t reconcile itself into a powerful whole, I must admit that the wild west antics I saw on screen is far more interesting than the typical disposable summer fare that can numb one’s brain.  

In 1869 Texas, we meet John Reid (Armie Hammer), a lawyer who has traveled to the town of Colby to visit his older brother, Dan (James Badge Dale).  Dan is a Texas Ranger who sets out with his comrades to capture the nasty outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Ficthtner) and his gang.  Thinking he can be of assistance, John asks to join the Rangers in tracking down Butch, and Dan deputizes him with a badge and allows him to tagalong on an expedition to find the evil outlaw.  But soon into their journey, Butch ambushes the rangers and all of them die a violent death.  

Soon after this deadly attack, a mysterious Comanche indian named Tonto (Johnny Depp) discovers the bodies of the Rangers and finds that Silver, a white spirit horse thought to be sacred with the Comanche, has revived John back from the dead.  Tonto explains to John that he is now a “spirit walker,” one who has been to the other side and cannot be killed.  Grasping his second chance at existence, John seeks to avenge his brother’s death and enlists Tonto to help him.  The Indian agrees, but only if John wears a mask to prevent his identity so those who think he is dead will continue to do so.  This gives John the new identity of The Lone Ranger, a ghostlike lawman whose thirst for justice leads him not only towards Butch, but a shady railroad tycoon named Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) who is conducting a sinister conspiracy that reveals painful trauma from Tonto’s past and threatens the family of John’s deceased brother.

One of the more distinct and unsettling things about The Lone Ranger is its tonal identity crisis which veers between slapstick comedy and dark western grit.  One moment, Tonto will be having a silly moment with a dead bird resting on top of his head, while the next moment finds Butch cutting out the organs of another man and eating them (off-camera, thank God).  I never thought I’d ever see a Hannibal Lecter moment in a Disney movie, and for that matter, I never thought I’d see Disney foot the bill for a shotgun marriage between a Martin-Lewis comedy and a Cormac McCarthy novel, but such are the wonders of life.  Yet if you’ve been watching Gore Verbinski’s movies all along, you’d know that creating uneasy balancing acts between ridiculousness and disparity has always been his M.O.  Just think of how you couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry while watching The Weather Man or the way jarring violence kept bringing the sweeter parts of The Mexican to a standstill.  Hell, even the Pirates of the Caribbean  movies had fearful thoughts about isolation and change lurking beneath the Hollywood busywork.  Absurd silliness and crushing misery co-existing in the same movie sounds like a strange concept until you catch on that life itself can often play out in that same way.

The only reason we’re even looking at a modern day update of The Lone Ranger in the first place is because Johnny Depp wanted to use his box office clout to create a populist western that illuminates the plights of Native Americans across U.S. history.  So the thing I admire most about the movie is how major plot developments bring considerable insight into tragic ordeals that Native Americans actually faced.  While the script lifts from older, better westerns to help get this point across, it’s still good to see these brutal truths given attention in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster tent-pole flick.  Most will probably have an awfully hard time swallowing the irony of the Disney corporation constructing a mass entertainment that frowns down upon big corporations, but I find it pretty damn funny how Johnny Deep used his star power to make a big capitalist entity point out the evils of big capitalism.

It quickly becomes apparent that the idea of Depp willing this movie into existence is far more interesting than his idea of an updated Tonto.  Depp’s objective was to give Tonto more prominence and personality than he’s been given in the past, making him just as heroic and independent as The Lone Ranger himself.  Yet Depp’s knack for exposing an independent character’s inner-weirdness and allowing their freak flag to fly puts a damaging hindrance on this western sidekick’s impact.  By making the Comanche warrior a crackpot misfit with slapstick tendencies, it’s obvious that Depp is trying to inject that old Jack Sparrow outcast appeal into the role, but it doesn’t create a dynamite hero Native Americans can be proud of.  I’m not saying that Native Americans are humorless people, but making Tonto a goofy loon isn’t really liberating the character from the numbskull stereotypes they've been plagued with throughout Hollywood history.  Perhaps if Depp played him straight, making him a proud thinking-man’s warrior, he could’ve honored his ancestors better while delivering one of his electric dramatic performances a’la John Dillinger.  Oddly enough, the straight-arrow Armie Hammer turns out to be the ace here, even as the script tries to damper-down his white-bred heroics.  The joke is that The Lone Ranger isn’t as knowledgable or savvy a western figure as myth would have you believe, but Hammer has a gift for making cracks in a golden boy image work to his advantage.  The way he overcomes shy-guy shakiness and bumbling inadequacies to fully honor the mythic character’s heroic ideals is very impressive.

Since we're on summer blockbuster territory here, you can bet that this flick ends with the expected pull-out-all-the-stops action finale.  But as far as these things go, it's more efficiently-staged than usual.  Instead of just being a mish-mash of explosions and fury, Verbinski actually puts his Jerry Bruckheimer-meets-Buster Keaton sensibilities to good use like he did in the better parts of Pirates of the Caribbean.  The result makes for plucky action that represents the one moment in the film that connects the strongest with the innocent charms of the older Lone Ranger adventures.  As the movie’s plot chugged along, I considered myself mildly amused by it all, but once the "William Tell Overture" started playing on the soundtrack and Hammer got on his literal high horse to ride off into this action climax, my inner-child actually got pretty damn excited the way he used to for Disney adventures of yesteryear. 

The history of classical pulp heroes points out that The Green Hornet is actually a descendant of The Lone Ranger, with both heroes sharing the surname of "Reid."  So it's worth noting that the modern-day cinematic updates of both those heroes weren't content to just convey the simple pleasures of their modest myths, but basked their adventures in post-modern irony and jazzed-up action adrenaline.  The sad truth is that if these updates stayed ultra-faithful to the classical feel of their heroes' origins, it probably wouldn't grab the attention of most modern moviegoers.  Yet the beauty of molding a pop hero towards the changing times they show up in is how shrewd a marker of culture it can serve as.  Just ponder the contrast between the campiness of the 1960's Batman TV show and the ultra-grittiness of the Dark Knight's recent big-screen outings, and you'd have enough material for endless college essays.  So while many may shake their heads at the dizzying tone and over-the-top action of the 2013 Lone Ranger, you have to keep in mind that it’s a testament to the entertainment era we're living in.  You may be complaining now, but there may come a time in the distant future where you'll look back with a smile and say "now THAT'S how they used to make them!"