Film Review: The Wolverine

The Wolverine. Rated M (frequent action violence and coarse language). 126 minutes. Directed by James Mangold. Screenplay by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank.

Verdict: A peculiar romance/superhero hybrid that never quite reaches its potential.

Can too much of Hugh Jackman’s incarnation as The Wolverine be a bad thing? With Jackman bulked up and front and centre in almost every frame, The Wolverine suffers from a frustrating unevenness in tone and a screenplay that veers dangerously toward the repetitive, tried-and-trusted superhero formula. It’s a shame, because when the film is raging against its peculiar ordinariness (the sequences on the roof of a Bullet Train and Wolverine being relentlessly harpooned to standstill are stand-outs), it shows real promise.

It begins, too, with a great set-up as the atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. Logan/Wolverine, who is imprisoned in a deep, brick-lined chamber, rescues a young Japanese soldier Yashida (Ken Yamamura) from the effects of the blast. Years later, Logan is summoned to the older Yashida’s (Haruhiko Yamanouchi) deathbed – ostensibly to be thanked for saving his life all those years ago. But as Yashida’s ulterior motive becomes clear, Logan must protect Mariko (Tao Okamoto), the heiress of the ageing Yashida’s technology company’s fortune in order to discover precisely what the ailing Yashida is really planning.

Mangold (3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line, Girl, Interrupted) is at his best in the well-considered, action set pieces, while Bomback (Total Recall, Unstoppable, Die Hard 4) and Frank’s (Marley & Me, Minority Report) screenplay lacks efficiency and only contains a couple of moments of genuine effectiveness. The problems stem from the key relationship between Logan and Mariko – on which film focuses almost entirely – and which is not interesting enough to sustain the film’s dramatic core. We too often find ourselves in a strange Marvel/Jason Bourne/Romantic Drama hybrid world, which is at complete odds with everything we are led to expect from the film’s opening sequences.

Rila Fukushima’s fabulous Yukio (an Anime-inspired character who insists on becoming Logan’s bodyguard), is the film’s saving grace (and the most accomplished performance), while Svetlana Khodchenkova’s toxic Viper simply doesn’t get enough screen time. Viper becomes a cardboard cut-out character, and with less of the Mariko/Logan romantic musings, she might have become a more interesting character – not to mention a fascinating foe for the ever-frowning, and mostly depressed (and depressing) Wolverine.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.