The Wolverine is the first Marvel movie since Iron Man to feel like a movie and not a feature-length, candy-colored advertisement for the Marvel “universe” and whatever money-raking project they have in the pipeline. It treats its protagonist as a person, not as a superhero or an icon. Its conflict takes place on a human scale and does not involve the mass destruction of cities or the scorching of the earth. There are good guys and bad guys but also characters who are ambiguous, and who have their own concerns outside the confines of the plot. Rather than serve up a non-stop fangasm, James Mangold’s film dares to take its time – to give a shit. And so it gives us something to care about, too.
The very first shot signals that we’re in for something different. In lieu of portentous voiceover or title sequence – or even a title card – we get a still, silent shot of the East China Sea. Mangold lets it sit there for a few seconds before panning over to a Japanese lookout sounding an alarm. It is, we realize, a flashback to just before the Americans drop a nuke on Nagasaki. Logan, a.k.a. the Wolverine, a mutant with an adamantium skeleton and the ability to heal instantaneously, shields a prison guard from the nuclear explosion that spreads fearsomely from the city center across the bay. The sight of the expanding mushroom cloud and the onrushing wall of fire is one of the most frightening moments at the movies in 2013.
In the present day, Logan (Hugh Jackman) is a weary, bearded drunk, wasting away somewhere in the north country. Haunted by the death of his lover, Jean Grey, he’s lost his sense of purpose and wishes for a death that – thanks to his gift and curse – will never come. His closest friend appears to be a huge grizzly bear with whom he has reached a tacit understanding: there’s a lovely shot of Logan walking through the forest as the bear appears slowly behind him, and we anticipate a confrontation only for the two of them to barely acknowledge each other.
The plot will involve the return of the prison guard Logan saved, now an obscenely wealthy old man who’s on the brink of death but hopes to avoid it. He has a granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto), who’s set to marry “kind of an asshole,” and whose adoptive sister (Rila Fukushima) has sworn to protect her from Yakuza thugs interested in what will happen to her grandfather’s vaguely-defined corporate empire when he dies. Logan will get involved in the family’s power struggle, which will put him squarely in the path of a mutant doctor (Svetlana Khodchenkova) who has her own nefarious designs.
But The Wolverine is really about Logan’s journey to rediscover a reason to live – and to reassume his mantle as a crusader for right and justice. The film invests in this notion, patiently limning Logan’s existential dilemma, time and again emphasizing the weight of the guilt and loss that he carries around. The inevitable romance between Logan and Mariko develops organically out of their common sense of obligation to something from their past that they’d just as soon shed but cannot. Even Logan’s trademark wisecracking takes on heft and meaning: it’s the gallows humor of someone who can find a laugh in anything because he has nothing to lose.
The film’s greatest asset is its courage to slow down – though when it does ramp up for an action scene, it can be formidable, as in a wonderfully brazen mid-film fight scene atop a train. Only in the last 20 minutes is it overcome by the imperative to resolve everything in a loud, attenuated climax. It’s disappointing, not least because the story leaves weird loose ends – what did the film’s one true villain want out of all this, exactly? But then it rallies with a beautiful, wry coda that lands the title character exactly where he needs to be; it feels just right.
There is a post-credits button that feels truer to the unfortunate Marvel tradition of servicing the fans at the expense of story and character. But by then, The Wolverine had won me over. A few stumbles aside, this is what a superhero movie should be: a heightened, stylized tale of human struggle and triumph.
One thought on “‘The Wolverine’: More Superheroes Like This, Please”
Could not agree more with this review and I am squealing a bit at the fact someone’s been able to write my feelings about it! Character based and with a smaller scale disaster/plot that doesn’t mean the end of the world and a need to destroy half of a major city for some overlong sequences of sky scrapers exploding, and it still comes out with my favourite action sequence of 2013? Very, very happy! Brilliant mixture of angst and proper closure that didn’t feel melodramatic, forced or take away from the essence of the character, ugh, just really happy with the handling of this film!