The pesky thing about spectacle is that it can only take a movie so far. You can create an action scene as big as you desire, but even if it’s done well there will inevitably be a hollowness at the film’s center. (see: Pacific Rim) Despite this, it’s become commonplace for summer movies to put all the focus on gigantic battle scenes, and far too many blockbusters since Transformers: Dark of the Moon have devoted their third acts to destroying major American cities. In the face of all this large-scale mayhem, The Wolverine almost seems a small independent production, which is a weird thing to say about a $125 million Marvel film about one of the most popular X-Men characters. There are still all the flashy action scenes you might expect, but The Wolverine wisely narrows its focus and decides to tell a more character-driven story that never really gets out of hand. It’s a welcome change, and while it inevitably has to get down to its action movie business at some point, the best moments come when director James Mangold is willing to let his film breathe.
The movie begins with a prologue that shows our immortal, clawed hero saving a Japanese soldier in Nagasaki from the dropping of the atomic bomb. Fast forward many years until after the events of The Last Stand, and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, duh) is mostly just hanging out as a sad mountain man and not doing anything productive in between nightmares about the late Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). One day a red-headed Japanese woman named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) shows up and takes Wolverine to Tokyo to meet the man he saved all those years ago: Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi). Yashida is on his deathbed, but before leaving he offers to take away Wolverine’s immortality. He is refused, and this sets off a chain of events that involve the Yakuza, a group of ninja assassins, and a toxic mutant named Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova).
If one strips The Wolverine of all the more fantastical elements—specifically, the fact that the protagonist is the Wolverine—then the film feels less like a superhero film and more like, say, a James Bond film. The exotic locale, the female supporting players, the ultra-rich antagonist looking to use his resources for dangerous personal gain—it almost feels like someone wrote a modern You Only Live Twice and gave it an X-Men twist prior to production. This is particularly true of the second act, which strips Wolverine of most of his powers and spends its time following our protagonist as he attempts to protect Yashida’s granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto) from potential kidnapping. It’s rather subdued as far as these things go, and it's done remarkably well. As always, Jackman sells everything just about perfectly, and his performance gives these relatively quiet moments much more weight than they might otherwise have.
I want to be careful to not oversell this aspect of the movie, because it also features Wolverine fighting a giant robot with a flaming sword. It’s not exactly a surprise that it all leads up to a third act fight sequence, but I was surprised at just how uninterested I was once that action kicked in. Really, a lot of the combat here—particularly that of the hand-to-hand variety—isn’t shot particularly well. The camera shakes a great deal and at its worst it can be a tad incoherent. The best action scene comes in the middle of the film, and it involves a few characters clinging to the top of a high-speed train. There’s a rhyme and rhythm to that sequence. It’s not just a chaotic barrage of punches, swords, gunshots and arrows.
If the action did wind up being as exciting as many of the smaller moments around it, then The Wolverine might have been something truly special. Even so, it’s still pretty darn entertaining, and it may be most admirable for not necessarily being all that ambitious. In this age of Christopher Nolan, too many “big” movies are going out of their way to try and blow the audience’s minds. The Wolverine has no such aims. Instead, it’s just a well-constructed action thriller with some fun characters and a great Japanese setting. Instead of being huge, it instead puts all its energy into being good, and that’s not a bad thing at all. If anything, the desire to feel big and epic was one of the things that held Man of Steel back. It could have benefitted from shutting up every now and then.
The Wolverine doesn’t need all those bells and whistles. It has the Wolverine, and in the minds of Mangold and writers Christopher McQuarrie, Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, they don’t need anything more to hook the audience. All they need to do is craft a good movie around him, and they did a fine job of that. It’s still a Marvel film, so there’s always going to be a fairly anonymous feel to the thing, and even when their films are bad they’re specifically made to go down easy. Even so, The Wolverine can’t help but feel like a minor response to Hollywood’s recent need to keep increasing the scale (and cost) of their projects. Just this past weekend, DC announced a Batman/Superman film for 2015, and there's no doubt will be a gigantic production. In many ways, The Wolverine strips a lot of the fat away and shows that you don’t need a lot of resources and special effects to make a good superhero movie. You just need an engaging protagonist, a distinct environment, and an entertaining mission for the hero to accomplish. It’s possible to entertain filmgoers and still keep most of New York City intact.
Grade: B+
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