The Wolverine
(2013)
How does a script regularly cited as among the best, if not the best, the superhero genre had to
offer end up as a movie so… run-of-the-mill? The answer must, in no small part,
lie with director James Mangold. The
Wolverine was to have be a Darren Aronofosky film, written by Christopher
McQuarrie. The brainsmith who directed The
Fountain teaming with the writer of The
Usual Suspects. It was a fresh and enticing proposition, particularly if it
reinvigorated a character who had already spent a decade on the big screen and whose
prior solo outing had been savagely mauled by critics, fans and audiences
alike.
Predictably, an arthouse sensibility melded to a superhero
franchise ended up stalling. Aronofosky cited the lengthy production period in
Japan, away from his family, but who knows if real cause wasn’t the notoriously
creatively-challenged Fox was pushing for something more safe and pedestrian. And
Mangold is about the safest pair of hands you can find. He doesn’t have a
terrible film on his resume but neither does he have a great one. He’s an above
par journeyman, and since the X-Men
franchise flourished under just such a non-auteur (Bryan Singer), his engagment
makes a lot of sense. This isn’t a series striving to deliver the best of the
best in comic book movies (whatever Hugh Jackman’s aspirations for his
character may be); Fox just needs to make enough money to keep the series
viable and ensure the rights don’t revert to Disney/Marvel.
I am a bit
disappointed; not overly so as my expectations for the series over the course
of six films have fluctuated. But I though First
Class was wonderful, right up there with the very best of its genre. Most
of that was down to Matthew Vaughn, who for whatever reason (did he want Bond, did he want Star Wars? He ended up getting The
Secret Service, which doesn’t fill me with anticipation) absconded from the
forthcoming Days of Future Past, so
the series looks set to remain agreeably unremarkable. But better than that
rocky patch when Brett Ratner and Gavin Hood had a bash.
Given the buzz surrounding the script, perhaps it was
inevitable that Mangold would come in and decided it needed tuning to his own
unique sensibility, to prove he’s nobody’s gun-for-hire (that’s how ego works,
isn’t it?) So in came Mark Bomback (the Total
Recall remake!) and Scott Frank (some very good scripts, to be fair) to
rework it. I can just about understand the decision not to make it another
prequel (they suck); less so the apparent dilution of any elements that would
have made it stand out. We end up with copious villains, far more than the plot
needs, set pieces shoehorned in because you should never be far from a grand
action beat, and a banal love interest; because isn’t that how it works?
In all fairness, the movie is thrilling and intriguing for
the first hour. Jackman’s Logan answers a summons from the dying Yashida
(Haruhiko Yamanouchi), whom he saved many years before. The carrot of a normal,
mortal life is dangled before Wolverine, just as he becomes aware of conflicts
within Yashida’s business empire. So Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada) is entirely
mercenary, and has arranged marriage between his daughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto,
who looks a little like a Japanese Jennifer Connolly but with even less
presence) and the Justice Minister, Noburo (Brian Tee). When Mariko’s life is
threatened, she and Wolverine go on the run. It’s at about this point that the
latter discovers his healing abilities aren’t what they once were.
There’s a fairly neat dividing line in terms of quality;
thumbs up until, and including, the set piece atop a bullet train (crazy, but
breathlessly thrilling). I’ll even include Wolvie’s slightly surprising
affinity for a poorly special effects bear in the good stuff, since it leads to
a jolly decent bar scene. Then, as flight shifts to romancing the insipid Mariko,
lethargy sets into both the drama and the viewer’s eyelids. Maybe with a
different actress or a different director the love plot wouldn't come across as
standard filler, but Okamoto has absolutely no presence and her character is thin
as they come. The scenes where she and Logan hang about at her cabin are banal.
Wolverine helps chop up a log fallen across the road, just to illustrate what
we already know (he gets tired!) and happen across the well he hid in 70 years
ago (well fancy that!)
Instead of a storyline that uncovers new facets of the
character, or pushes him in directions we haven’t seen before, Wolverine is
given a somewhat dopey stew of corporate intrigue to sift through (not all that
intriguing as it turns out, with a signposted twist; Iron Man Three, which this has a couple of thematic links to, made
business world villainy much more involving) and has a fling with a standard Bond girl. There’s zero passion here,
and even less motivation; the effect is to standardise Wolverine. He becomes
just like any other protagonist. Sure, he gets a bit temperamental at times and
has some pointy claws but it’s nothing to get worked up about. He has a fling
with Mariko because she’s there, not because he’s captivated with her; yeah,
he’s really exuding that Ronin thing. Indeed, the only aspect that stands out
is his version of 007’s Tracy (Bond’s
one great love) is haunting his dreams. It’s not really a spoiler, since she
appears in the trailers, but the return of Famke Jansen as Jean Grey is well
judged, even if it’s entirely unnecessary (and serves to accentuate how wet his
current emotional entanglement is). Bond
may not have been consciously on Mangold’s mind for the love interest (who wants
to admit to engineering a shallow romance?) but elsewhere he directly quotes
the series; the Diamonds are Forever
swimming pool scene, anyone?
The Bond
comparisons don’t end there; Wolverine may be sampling Japanese culture, but the
setting has no more substance than your average globetrotting 007 tourist destination. The terrain
isn’t negotiated as shamelessly as in The
Last Samurai, but every cliché and stereotype is present and correct;
yakuza, hara-kiri, samurais, technological virtuosity (Yashida’s firm not only delivers
cutting edge science, but everyone wanders around in traditional garb; it’s
every westerner’s dream of the country!) Nevertheless, the WWII prologue is
thrilling even if it's an over-obvious reference point. Flirting with major historical
tragedies can seem rather bad taste, but X-Men
has taken in concentration camps so why not Hiroshima? The problem is
throughout that, while the film has muscle, it has no dramatic weight. When
Wolverine is called a Ronin, the reference is as superficial as any western
movie take on the Land of the Rising Sun; conjuring the word doesn’t make it
so. Jackman is straining his hardest but the results that are merely aesthetically
more pleasing than his Origins;
they’re not the giant leap they needed to be.
The aspect of the movie that seemed most rote at first
glance turns out to work surprisingly well. As far back as Superman II, depriving the hero of his powers has been used as a
means of reintroducing threat to an unstoppable force. More recently we saw it
in Spider-man 2. Earlier this summer
Tony Stark had to make do without his suit for an entire act. So I expected
Wolverine’s inability to heal would be a desperate retread of this standard
superhero trope, one that would cast a weary shadow over the entire movie.
Unlike Shane Black, Bomback and Frank don’t have anywhere really interesting to
take their steadily bleeding hero, and there is a point where you start thinking “Enough already!” But the
choice does up the stakes a bit, and
by opting to merely slow him down rather than make him fully mortal they pull
back from a taking the pedestrian route. It still feels too familiar, though;
anything that made this different in the first place has been committee-managed
back into conformity. And on a nit-picking
level, I’m not clear why Wolverine’s knuckles don’t turn to a bloody pulp
whenever he gets his claws out. Shouldn’t they take just as long to heal as his
bullet wounds?
As mentioned there are too many bad guys; you don’t need
five villains if you can make just one compelling. In two instances the
willingness of the bad guys to do anything to reach their goal doesn’t compute given
who they're willing to sacrifice; they do these things just because evil types
shoud behave that way (come the climax even one of the protagonists is at it,
laying down some ultra-violence without the bat of an eye – and you’re left
asking why the writers thought they could get away with it). There's another
character that flip-flops all over the good-but-misguided line and ends up
being used in a "tedious antagonist one moment, hero the next"
manner.
What might have been taut and streamlined becomes too much,
which sums up the third act. Wolverine has to battle a standard CGI baddie
because that’s what you have to do in third acts. If the love story started to
unravel a promising tale, the big fight finishes things off. It’s been devised
on autopilot, even with a late stage reveal that is both unsurprising and kind
of seals the deal on the shift from a vaguely real-world setting to a pixelated
one. The effects are pretty good until this characters shows up. Marco
Beltrami’s score was probably “okay”, but I can’t recall a single note (can
anyone remember any of his soundtracks?)
Aside from Okamoto, the performances are solid, just without
strong characterisations to make them memorable; Rila Fukushima, with her
quirky angular features, makes the strongest impression as Wolverine's feisty
sidekick. The only bad thing I can say about Svetlana Khondchenkova’s Viper is
that the she seems to have strayed from a full-blown X-Men movie; you can almost hear a producer demanding “more
mutants!” Jackman ripples with more man
beef than he's ever sported before, but it feels like there’s left to do with
this character solo. At least, not if you don’t have a really good story.
The end credits coda that is quite fun (Fox shamelessly
stealing from actual Marvel movies
there), and one has to assume that a certain physical alteration our hero
undergoes will become a significant plot point in Days of Future Past. But is anyone really getting excited for it? I
doubt that even the lure of a movie chock full of nigh on everyone who’s ever
acted in the X-verse will
substantially lift the box office. Fox had their fresh start with First Class but have chosen to reheat
yesterday’s dinner. Like The Wolverine,
it is sure to be entirely competent but sadly non-awesome.
***