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Baron Bifford
May 24, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 3 years!
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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