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Most clichés of American action films set in Japan are present and accounted for. Honor. Ninjas. Samurais. Mechas. But no fancy toilets or anime. The action scenes are still silly and lack visceral impact, though on the bright side it's a step above the horrible wire-fu of the earlier installments. Somehow Wolverine manages to fight without shedding much blood even though he is in theory a blender on legs. Hugh Jackman's Wolverine has never been quite as aggressive or savage as his comic book counterpart. He's way too family-friendly The film really has two plots running alongside each other where Wolverine and his love interest are running away from two different factions: yakuzas, then (suddenly...) ninjas. It's like they tried to fuse two stories into one, and the fusion is OK but not seamless. Tao Okamoto's character, Mariko, is a yawner. She's the the stereotypically stoic Japanese princess. The other female lead, Rila Fukushima as Yuriko, is much more compelling. She has the power to forsee people's deaths, and though her visions are incomplete they are never wrong. Her power is there to clue us to an eventual plot twist, but it is sorely underused. After all, if this woman can predict the inevitable circumstances of your eventual death, don't you gain a sort of invincibility? "You are destined to get eaten by a shark, so quit being a pussy and go kick that tiger's rear end". The film missed an opportunity to toy with this. Finally, Svetlana Khodchenkova plays a watered-down version of Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy (she wears green and has a poison kiss she uses on every guy in sight). 3/5 - a decent but not great film. A good way to pass the afternoon if there's nothing better to do. Baron Bifford fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Aug 2, 2013 |
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Jul 30, 2013 16:20
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 16:48 |
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An improvement over the last film... In fact it'd be easy to say that someone said "Hey gently caress that film even existed, because now Wolverine needs to be aware of his own history". Basically The Wolverine is an absolutely mindless flick not trying to be anything more than something to keep you distracted while you munch down two thousand calories worth of popcorn. Fighting... Brooding... Mutants... It's all there. Of course this time it's set in stereotype-Japan, so we get ninjas. Ninjas are always cool I guess. Also bullet trains make for a far better battle ground than traditional American trains apparently. If you're the sort of person who doesn't like to think while he watches an invincible, brooding, hulk of a hero rip apart people left and right in a PG-13 fashion then you already know this film is for you. If not... Well then you suck. 3/5
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Aug 2, 2013 00:10
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A predicable plot that tries to fool us into thinking its not predicable until the very end when we don't want our predictions to be true:We've already met the real antagonist and he wants what he asked for at the beginning of the film: Wolverine's healing ability. This makes every other antagonist a throw-away character with no purpose at all aside from being a red herring. On top of all that, some fans (and definitely comic-book nerds) will be annoyed at the handling of certain concepts already established in the X-Men universe. I gave X-Men: First Class a pass because although it had many negatives, there were sufficient positives to make it worth while... Unfortunately for The Wolverine, there are too few positives. 2 out of 5.
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Sep 7, 2013 21:55
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