Superhero Media: The Wolverine

I have a few friends who claim that X-Men is their favorite superhero film franchise, which I tend to find funny, as such an announcement usually comes with a caveat that it's really only certain films. I'm not going to make fun of that right here, but I will mention that, for some reason, The Wolverine gets forgotten, but it's one of the better ones. I get it, The Wolverine came between First Class (the racist one that everyone loves) and Days of Future Past (probably the best team outing) and looked like a sequel to the disappointing Origins Wolverine, so a lot of people gave it a miss. What we all missed was a surprisingly tight Yakuza thriller with added mutants and PTSD, probably the best Hugh Jackman had been in the role up to this point and some great action scenes. Looking back, The Wolverine isn't up to the measure of Logan, but we'll get to the secrets of Logan in due course. What The Wolverine is, is a solid action film that Logan just happens to be wandering around, which is pretty much exactly what it needed to be. 

Starting with a flashback to the bombing of Nagasaki at the end of WWII, Logan wakes to find himself living rough in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, running from his past and watching bears urinate. After taking revenge on some hunters for using illegal arrows, Logan meets Yukio, a young woman in the employ of the powerful Yashida family, who possesses the precognitive ability to determine when a person will die. The patriarch of the Yashida family is dying and wants to see Logan, who saved him from the Nagasaki bombing, one more time before he dies. Very quickly, Logan and Yukio are embroiled in a battle for the future of the family interests, with the anointed heir, Mariko, caught between tradition, duty, Logan and the Yakuza. The absolute smartest choice the writers of The Wolverine made was to reduce Logan's healing ability for the majority of the film; so good, in fact, that they did it again in Logan. For once, Logan is at risk himself, which means when he throws himself in harm's way, the act is heroic, something the character hasn't had much of a chance to be before. 

Having, somewhat, learned from the mistakes of Origins Wolverine, the claws are no longer just CGI and most of the fights are done practically, though the film is still going for too sleek a look to be truly visually interesting. I get why Viper is here, but she feels like an unnecessary antagonist just so Yukio gets to fight someone in the climax, but Jean Grey isn't really even there and gets some of her best lines and scenes in the entire series, so it kind of evens out. In terms of being a Yakuza action film, The Wolverine isn't great, but combining the genre with a superhero is pretty damn interesting, and I wouldn't mind seeing it done again sometime, even just with Wolverine again, if it came to it. Unless The New Mutants drops in the next few days, The Wolverine marks the halfway point in the X-Men series for my re-watch, which feels crazy, like how are there this many? I'm very cognitively aware that there are a lot of MCU and Dragon Ball Z films, but somehow I always forget about the X-Men franchise. Still, I'm very happy I got to see this one again, I think it may go in the rotation a little more now.