The most intimate look at mutant Logan

Film review: The Wolverine

MANILA, Philippines - Despite the fact that X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were not quite what fans expected, there was never a doubt that the Marvel Comics franchise would continue to be seen on the big screen. The comic books remain hugely popular and several mutant characters whose stories could be retooled for X-Men films are available all the time. Besides, there will always be Hugh Jackman to play Wolverine.

Tall, dark and just a bit shy of being classically handsome, Jackman is the ideal movie star. He does everything. He can act, sing, dance and be romantic. Remember him in love with Meg Ryan in Kate and Leopold or as the irresistible cattle drover opposite Nicole Kidman in Australia? He was a virile baritone in Oklahoma and his Jean Valjean in Les Miserables reaped a Golden Globe award and almost got an Oscar, too. None of these compare though to the thrill of watching him as the mutant Wolverine.

As a comic book character, Wolverine is now 39 years old. He was born in the pages of Marvel Comics in 1974 as one of the X-Men. But he is said to be a hundred years old in the stories, immortal with self-healing powers. I guess that means he has already been through several lifetimes, most of them unhappy. What else can he be with no family, no friends of his own age and wearied by all the suffering he had seen? It is no wonder then that he keeps mostly to himself, brooding about his existence and subject to frequent outbursts of primal rage.

I do not know how high Wolverine ranks in the fan following hierarchy of the X-Men but he is the one I like best. That is why I am glad that director James Mangold and screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank have found a way to present him in a new light in The Wolverine. There is nobody more irritating than an ill-tempered old man and that is just what he might become after six or seven pictures. 

Besides, Wolverine is also that most problematic of action heroes. His wounds heal by themselves and he cannot die. How will a filmmaker build suspense and elicit thrills when the audience knows that the hero will turn out OK anyway? The Wolverine solved that problem and it also opened up the story, plus of course, the setting to an entirely new place in the X-Men saga. 

The Wolverine is based on the Japan Saga, an X-Men comics series issued in the ’80s. It tells of how Logan or Wolverine, who was hibernating among grizzlies in Alaska after the death of Jean Grey in The Last Stand, is invited to visit Japan to help out an old friend. This was the jailer, whose life he saved during the bombing of Nagasaki in World War II. Now a millionaire industrialist, Yashida is sick and dying and in the midst of a complicated battle among his family and business associates. Then because the story is set in Japan, Logan will also come face to face with the yakuza, ninjas, samurai and other colorful characters right out of a manga serial.

Admittedly, what Wolverine is up against here pales in importance against his previous battles where the fate of the whole world is at stake. His enemies here are merely gangsters and money grabbers although they are also no less dangerous. Somebody wants to get his hands on whatever makes Wolverine immortal and another somebody wants to kidnap and maybe also kill the Yashida heiress.

What I find most interesting about the picture is how Mangold deftly maneuvered the story to stay within the confines of X-Men while also releasing Wolverine into a new milieu — a beautifully photographed and wonderfully utilized Japan. He also proves here that he, too, has a feel for action spectacles. These are not in the usual comic book epic scale but all are expertly realized and pertinent to the story. 

Take note of Wolverine in a sword fight with ninjas, of the destruction of Nagasaki from the atom bomb, of Logan and Yashida fleeing from the nuclear fall-out in the city, of a thrilling fight in a bullet train running at 300 miles per hour and that finale against a vicious seemingly indestructible Silver Samurai in a robot suit.

But because this is the same director of the Academy Award nominated Walk The Line and Girl Interrupted, he treats moviegoers to a deeper look at Wolverine’s agonies. Mangold shows the mutant as a man, a friend, lover and big-hearted savior, who remains lost about what this world wants to do with him. Maybe it would indeed be better if he were to die.

This is the most intimate Wolverine has ever been with the other characters and with the moviegoers in any X-Men flick. This adds considerable weight and substance to the movie and raises it above the usual action film. I do hope that Wolverine becomes a cue for moviemakers to first see into the insides of their superheroes before they send them off to save the world. 

And how great to know that Jackman has effortlessly risen to Mangold’s new demands from his character. I am sure there will be another Wolverine in films someday but I do not think no one will ever be as perfect as Jackman is in this picture. His Logan is still angry and sad and snarling most of the time but I now know and I feel why.