Average User Score:
6.7
Nov 28, 2013
This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
It's late, but I finally watched it in DVD. And I have to say the Wolverine is at most an above average adventure movie.
Hugh Jackman, as always, shows that he is the one to play Logan. Although the character in X-Men is always 2-dimensional archetypal anti-hero, at least here there is some room to flesh out his character. Unfortunately, they didn't give a lot of growth to the character. The essential theme to the film is living past regrets and pain, that the body may heal, but the mind doesn't. You get to see Wolverine trying to live past Jean Grey after X-Men 3 (and kudos to them bringing back Famke Janssen in an effort to internalise the struggle. And succeed they did!). It got him quite stuck in the grieving stage until he falls in love with Mariko Yashida. I can see where they are going with the love plot, and mostly they did an average job. It just needed more chemistry and polishing before I can believe this love story. And the coda to the film does get him past grief, but I hated Logan mentioning that "He is a soldier" and stuff. There is nothing holding him back from living with Mariko, no commitments to the X-Men (at least until the credits), and yet he chooses to live on in conflict. This isn't Batman where he has a purpose to the point of obsession, he is not tied to an altruistic cause.
The action sequences are quite well done. Lots of melee fighting, wire-fu, and good fight choreography. The people that are suppose to fight, can do so in a heart-pounding scene. However, I must stress that the green screen effects are not so impressive. This is true in the bullet train sequence. You just can't believe Logan is fighting people on a 300mph train, because the wind and the actors don't give that sort of impression. CGI is a slight cut above average. The SIlver Samurai's armor is monochromatically silver, making it easy to model, texture and light. But it just needed more polishing before it looks like an actual object in the physical world. Several times during the final fight, the CG almost fell into last-gen video game graphics territory.
I need to mention Yuriko, the red-haired woman. It's mentioned that she is a precog, trained in fighting. She demonstrates the latter very well, but the former is poorly conveyed. In a film, I do not like it when things are told to me, and not showed to me. The vision she had on Logan's "death" could have been shown to the audience using blurry/transition shots, and it would have been fine. As a character, she isn't quite deep; that goes to Mariko.
Ironically the plot of the film ends up revealed to me 10 minutes into the movie. Yashida basically told Logan that he is the villain when he proposed to transfer his healing factor to another person permanently. Given that he himself is dying, and the look on his eyes show that he is a man who gets what he wants, it is no big leap or surprise to me when the big reveal shows that he is the villain. Which is probably why after the 1st action sequence, the writers decided to pull a farce and artificially deepen the movie.
To me, complexity of the story should be reflected in depth and quality, not in the number of subplots you can juggle around with. It confuses people as to who the main players are in each subplot, and to recognise when it starts and concludes, and the magnitude of its conclusion to the main plot. Worse, given that every secondary character in this movie is 2-dimensional, superficial, and otherwise generic, it is hard to get invested. The entire Yashida clan was a nest of vipers after the "death" of the old man. There is a revenge subplot because of being left out in the will, there is the Yakuza, there is the venomous Dr., there is the ronin clan of ninjas who supposedly looks out for the Yashida clan even though they are actively hunting Mariko and Logan in a similar fashion to the Yakuza. Add Logan's grief, his loss of healing factor, and the romance, and you get a confusing web of plots that appear and disappear with no consequence. It just leaves me preoccupied with questions, instead of enjoying the film.
One of the plot holes in the film is apparent when Logan and Mariko do not call for help from the Yashida's even when they could at some points. Its explained in a reasonable attempt later on, and validates it ex post facto, but its not good if the actors appear to read ahead of the script and act as such.
The loss of healing factor plot to me is rivetting, as it finally shows vulnerability on Logan's side, but ultimately pointless in the grand arc. What's the point of making him vulnerable (and probably killed soon), if ultimately you need him alive to extract his healing factor, Mr Yashida? Oops, a plot hole?
In conclusion, the Wolverine is a film about Logan moving past the grieving stage. It showed a decent development for Logan in this regard, but the web of superfluous subplots makes it difficult to enjoy the film as it is. It would be better if they just keep it simple.… Expand
This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
