The Wolverine Movie Review

The latest Wolverine movie directed by James Mangold is loosely based on the original Wolverine comic mini-series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. Unlike the previous Wolverine movie which was an origin story and took place before the original X-Men movies, this one is set after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand.

Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has retreated to the wilderness and cut himself off from the X-Men, still reeling from killing Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) in X-Men 3. However, Jean Grey does make a number of appearances throughout this movie in dream hallucinations. After a scene lifted directly from the comic books where Logan heads into a nearby town to seek some justice for a grizzly bear inhumanely shot with a poison arrow by incompetent hunters, he is approached by Yukio (Rila Fukushima) who has come to bring Logan to Japan to say goodbye to Yashida, a powerful Japanese business man once saved by Logan during World War II and now dying.

In Japan, Logan is presented with an opportunity to give up his healing powers, the very thing his immortality. From there, the real adventure begins thanks to the involvement of such characters as Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) and Silver Samurai.

Overall, I really enjoyed this movie. The story did have a number of deviations from the source material but did a good job keep the overall feel of the Claremont series/ While the villains also deviated some from their comic book counterparts, they also kept the essence of who they were. For instance Viper in the movie is a mutant who portrays the abilities of her namesake whereas she has no super powers in the comics. Despite the deviation, the essence of the Viper character remained true unlike Deadpool in the last Wolverine movie and the Mandarin character in Iron Man 3.

The Wolverine is also less action-packed than we have seen recently with comic book based movies. There are a number of fight scenes throughout the movie including one that pushes the realistic boundaries a little when Logan takes on some ninjas on top of a bullet train, but huge explosions and city-wide destruction is notably absent. I personally feel this is a good thing, but some may feel the movie drags in parts.

Overall I felt this was a good Wolverine movie that stayed true enough to the source material to make comic book fans happy but deviated enough to keep non-comic fans interested. I was particularly happy that it seems 20th Century Fox has been taking some lessons from Marvel when it comes to setting up future movies. One of the coolest scenes in the movie comes in the after-credits scene which lays some serious ground work for the next X-Men movie and will leave you with a number of questions that will need answering.

I didn’t think this movie was as good as Avengers but definitely was better than the last Wolverine movie and Iron Man 3. It builds excitement for the next X-Men movie, X-Men: Days of Future Past. If you are an X-Men fan, then I think you will want to check this one out.

Grade: B-