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.
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