The Wolverine (2013)

The Wolverine (2013)

Release Date: July 24, 2013

The disastrous X-Men Origins Wolverine somehow didn’t put Fox off the idea of giving Wolverine his own solo adventure, but they did wait a few years before trying again. Fortunately, The Wolverine is a significant improvement on the previous film.

Plot Summary / Riffing

Spoiler Warning for those who haven’t seen the film yet. The twist here isn’t one everyone knows, so I mean it this time!

Enough time has passed since the controversial X-Men: The Last Stand that we’re finally getting a new X-Men film set following its events. Wolverine has left the X-Men out of guilt and is now living in a cave without a box of scraps when he is visited by a young woman named Yuriko. She explains that Wolverine saved the life of her grandfather Yashida by protecting him from the nuclear bomb at Nagasaki. He is now dying of old age and wants Wolverine to visit him in Japan. Wolverine goes since it’s nice to have a holiday at someone else’s expense once in a while, and he was trying to come up with a way of procrastinating from putting up that shelf in his cave anyway.

Yashida tells Wolverine that he has come up with a way to take Wolverine’s healing factor away and give it to Yashida because he wants to live, but Wolverine says no because he’s afraid of needles after that Weapon X business, and Yashida dies that night, which honestly raises questions as to whether he would have survived long enough to undertake the transfer process anyway. Before dying, he throws a hissy fit and decides that if he can’t have Wolverine’s healing factor, Wolverine can’t have it either, and Yashida’s doctor Viper puts a squid inside Wolverine that takes away his healing factor. This is Wolverine though, so he’s still a double hard bastard.

Yashida’s will states that his entire fortune goes to his other grand-daughter Mariko, which is a decision her father Shingen and fiancée Noburo are not okay with, so they put a Yakuza hit on her, but Wolverine and Mariko are able to escape thanks to Japanese Hawkeye being a team-killing fucktard. Viper punishes Japanese Hawkeye for his incompetence by using Reptile’s acid spit fatality on him, though he survives. The Yakuza eventually capture Mariko, prompting Wolverine to do his best impression of Liam Neeson in Taken, throwing Noburo off a balcony (he was lucky enough to land in a swimming pool that appeared beneath him to keep the film at a 12A) and awarding Shingen the title of Worst Dad Ever, with his prize being getting stabbed in the throat. Wolverine also finds the time to get the squid out and get his healing factor back, which means that the battle to see who’s more OP between him and Alice from the Resident Evil movies is back on.

While Wolverine was busy with that, Mariko suffers kidnapception when Japanese Hawkeye kidnaps her under orders from Viper, to be used as bait for Wolverine. Wolverine takes the bait and is turned into a pincushion for his troubles, which is strange since the arrows have ropes attached and he doesn’t try to cut the ropes. When Wolverine comes to, Viper has him strapped to an operating table and plans to have the Silver Samurai, a giant samurai robot made of adamantium that looks like Shredder, cut Wolverine’s claws off. Mariko is able to get Wolverine free and Japanese Hawkeye switches sides, only to die almost immediately afterwards. Meanwhile, Viper sheds her skin, and Yuriko is unimpressed by such a lame evil transformation, so she chokes Viper, then cuts a rope to hang her and she bangs her head on the elevator going in the opposite direction, because there’s no kill like overkill. Wolverine cuts Shredderbot’s head off, only to find that it’s a mech suit operated by Yashida, who isn’t dead after all (The guy who died was a struggling British actor named Trevor Slattery.) Yashida cuts Wolverine’s claws off and absorbing the adamantium from his body, but Mariko interrupts the process, allowing Wolverine to grow new bone claws and throw Yashida off a cliff to his seeming death. Even if he did survive, he’s not getting back up that cliff in that big Steel Samurai suit. He’s no Heihachi Mishima after all.

This film is quite a departure tonally from the previous X-Men films, which the film commits to admirably. Unlike X-Men Origins Wolverine, which felt like an X-Men film that had Wolverine alone in it because of reasons, this one does do something new and different for the series. This feeling is aided by the new Japanese setting and cast of characters, and the only returning characters, besides post-credits cameos, being Wolverine and the ghost of Jean Grey. The shift towards “When suddenly ninjas!” is handled much better here than in Elektra, as despite the changes, the film still feels like it belongs in the same universe as the previous X-Men films. The smaller, more intimate scale allows the film to better explore Wolverine as a character than the last spin-off did, which limited most of the character development to the opening credits. There’s a world-weariness to the character that was merely hinted at occasionally before, but is brought to the forefront here. Taking away Wolverine’s healing factor for most of the film is a great idea too, as it aids the exploration of Wolverine’s mortality. It’s easier to care about Wolverine’s character development when he isn’t an indestructible juggernaut who could probably survive being shot into the sun, like in The Last Stand or X-Men Origins Wolverine, and the idea that for all his death seeking tendencies, Wolverine starts having second thoughts when confronted with the possibility of death is rather ironic. The nerf also works on a practical level, since most of the antagonists in this film aren’t mutants.

The darker feel of the film helps the plot and character development, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have as much success with the action scenes. Because they’re more brutal and less fantastical, due to Wolverine hacking up people with swords and guns, the editing is from the we wanted a 12A school of spastic editing and camera angles that make it difficult to see what’s going on and leaves a lot of it out of shot for the sake of getting a lower rating. Also, Wolverine is the only character capable of bleeding. This is rather annoying since the franchise hasn’t done this before, and hopefully it won’t become a trend. At its heart, the film can’t get away from its status as a superhero movie. Many of the action scenes are fine despite this, with the train scene being the standout, but the climax is more like a scene from Iron Man, and is at odds with the tone the rest of the film had had up to that point.

I dare you to watch the bit on the train when Wolverine does his Superman impression without saying “Hugh Jackman away!”

The biggest issue with the film is one that hurts the film in retrospect. The Wolverine was followed a year later by X-Men: Days of Future Past, which rebooted the film series so that only X-Men: First Class remained canon. The knowledge that this film is ultimately pointless hangs over it now, more so than the first three, because they were around for a while. The Wolverine was irrelevant within a year of its release. The filmmakers had to have done some work on Days of Future Past and known what would happen while The Wolverine was in production, which makes it even more of a shaggy dog story. Surely they would have been better off holding back this film for a year or two and releasing it after Days of Future Past, so that they could avoid making the whole thing a pointless endeavour, and in particular having this film’s new developments of Wolverine’s bone claws, getting over killing Jean Grey and Yukio tagging along with Wolverine amount to nothing?

While the timing of the film’s release is unfortunate for that reason, I can’t hold it against the film too much because it isn’t to blame for something out of its control. What I can say however is that The Wolverine proves that Wolverine can carry his own film without the result being a disaster.

Bonus: If you want fun times, synch up the train scene in this film with the audio of the train scene from Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers. Hilarity ensues!

Next Time: This film, it is good. Another!