The Wolverine

The first genuinely ineffective entry within the ongoing X-Men series, The Wolverine follows Hugh Jackman’s title character as he’s reluctantly drawn into a feud involving the descendants of a powerful Japanese businessman – with the situation complicated by Logan’s romantic feelings towards said businessman’s daughter (Tao Okamoto’s Mariko). There’s little doubt that The Wolverine does, in its early stages, possess a great deal of promise, as the movie opens with an engrossing WWII-set sequence that establishes a tone of unexpected grittiness – with that vibe perpetuated by an initial emphasis on Wolverine’s solo antics within the remote wilderness. It’s not until Logan arrives in Japan that The Wolverine begins to lose its hold on the viewer, with the movie’s almost unreasonably subdued vibe is compounded by a distressing lack of compelling elements. (There are, for example, virtually no intriguing periphery characters here, which makes it awfully difficult to work up any real interest in Wolverine’s ongoing exploits.) With the exception of an appreciatively over-the-top fight atop a speeding bullet train, The Wolverine boasts few action sequences that are able to inject any energy into the otherwise lifeless atmosphere – with the feeble final act, involving Logan’s yawn-inducing battle with a giant robot, ensuring that the movie ends on a seriously anti-climactic and underwhelming note. The end result is a curiously half-baked endeavor that makes the reviled X-Men Origins: Wolverine look masterful by comparison, and it’s ultimately clear that the movie simply doesn’t have anything interesting or relevant to say about the iconic Marvel character.

** out of ****