The Wolverine by James Mangold (review)

The Wolverine is the sixth big-budget film in the X-Men franchise produced by Twentieth Century Fox in association with Marvel Entertainment, and the second of the Wolverine films. The film starts not from the ending of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Hood US/UK 2009), as one might expect, but some time after X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner Canada/US/UK 2006), in which Logan, aka Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), was forced to kill the woman he loves, Jean Grey/Phoenix (Famke Janssen), to stop her fury and new powers from destroying the world. He now lives in the woods, and with his long-hair, full beard and generally unkempt appearance looks more like mountain man Jeremiah Johnson than an X-Man. He is not in any better shape emotionally. He lives in a cave, his possessions consist of the clothes he is wearing, empty booze bottles and pictures of Jean, and he has constant nightmares.

The film features the requisite scenes of the buff, completely nude or bare-chested Jackman as it continues – following the earlier films and various other X-Men and Wolverine titles – to explore Wolverine’s tortured and animal nature. At the film’s opening he is keeping a promise to Jean (though it is unclear whether he made it to the living Jean or the dream version that haunts his nightmares) to leave his violent ways behind, but he is soon punishing some hunters for wounding and poisoning a local grizzly bear that goes mad and kills five people. Logan, at the bear’s behest, puts the suffering grizzly out of its misery and then goes into town to teach the hunters a lesson. In this way the connection between the Wolverine and the bear, and through that association the animalistic nature of Logan, is effectively established.

The movie then quickly shifts focus with the arrival of Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a young female Japanese fighter/samurai and mutant (she can foresee people’s deaths), who has been tasked with finding Logan for her benefactor – Japanese industrialist Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi/Ken Yamamura as young man). Yashida is dying and wants Logan to come to Japan so he can say good-bye. Logan, as shown in the nightmare flashback that opens the film, saved Yashida from the US nuclear bomb that levelled Nagasaki. When he meets with Yashida, after a scene in which two older Japanese women strip Logan to ‘disinfect’ him, the real reason for his summons is revealed and several other plot lines are also set into motion. This is also when the film’s multiple plotlines cloud its narrative trajectory as it becomes difficult to know who is on which side in the middle of all the family intrigue, Yakuza plots and the machinations of evil mutant Dr Green/Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkove), who has figured out a way to transfer Logan’s healing abilities and longevity to another person. Yashida explains how the procedure will benefit them both – he will get to live forever and Logan will be released from the immortality that he has come to see as a curse rather than a boon. Logan is clearly world-weary, and in his dreams Jean repeatedly asks him to come to her, to meet her in death, but Yashida’s offer is far from altruistic and, as soon becomes apparent, he will not take no for an answer.

On the most basic level, the film has all the required generic elements of any action film and Wolverine story. When Logan tries to leave and the dying Yashida informs his granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto) that he is leaving his empire to her rather than to her father, all hell breaks loose with attempted assassinations, sword fights, gun battles and hand-to-hand combat on large and small scales. All this allows for some engaging battle sequences, such as a fight on top of a bullet train, in which Logan uses his claws to keep...