By Preston Wilder
James Bond went to Japan in You Only Live Twice. Wolverine (or ‘the’ Wolverine) also goes to Japan – and indeed he also lives twice, dying at one point only to come back to life almost immediately. “I was wrong,” smiles Yukio (Rila Fukushima), who can predict people’s deaths and in fact predicted that Wolverine was about to kick the bucket, giving the scene a suspense that turns out to be spurious. She was wrong, false alarm, sorry audience – though I guess she was right if you want to be technical, since Wolfie does ‘die’ for about two seconds.
You didn’t think they were going to kill him off midway through his own movie, did you?
Then again, that might’ve been appropriate – because Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) craves Death, having had enough of life as an invulnerable mutant. The recent glut of superhero films has allowed even comic-book illiterates like myself to figure out some basic rules, especially the Marvel vs. DC divide: both are comic-book publishers, but Marvel (whence come the X-Men and The Avengers) go for bright, sometimes comedic superheroes whereas DC (they own Batman and Superman) specialise in more tormented types. Wolverine is Marvel – he’s an X-Person – but he’s more like a DC character, tinged with regret and melancholy. “Not a hunter?” asks a friendly shop clerk somewhere in Canada. “Not anymore,” replies our hero with inscrutable sadness.
This is pre-Japan, of course, when Wolfie’s hanging out in the snowy wilderness, scratching at trees out of sheer frustration (he has claws, for the uninitiated) and being greeted by a passing grizzly who recognises a fellow wild animal. Yet we’ve already had a rather strange prologue, set during the detonation of the atom bomb in Nagasaki; Wolfie was there, it turns out, and saved the life of a Japanese soldier by shielding him with his body (even an atom bomb can’t hurt Wolverine, though he looks a bit charred) – and this soldier, now a dying tycoon, invites our hero to Japan, offering to take away his accursed immortality and let him join his beloved Jean Grey in death, Jean being an X-Lady who perished in X-Men: The Last Stand seven years ago but still appears to Wolfie in nightmares saying encouraging things like “You can’t hide!”.
Wolverine’s death-wish is the most intriguing part of The Wolverine – yet the film remains a curiously muted blockbuster. Summer movies tend towards globe-trotting plots and all-star casts, yet Jackman is the only famous name here and Japan is the only location, excepting those few minutes in the snowy wilderness; the plot is scrappy but generic – mostly a matter of people getting kidnapped and having to be rescued – and adds very little to Wolfie’s psychology or the overall X-Men cosmos. The result feels less like a big Hollywood film than a very special, going-to-Japan episode of a ‘Wolverine’ TV series.
There are minor compensations. Fukushima, with her flame-haired sauciness and gift for prophecy, is a strong sidekick (alas, she gets less to do as the film goes on). The villain is a snake-like temptress known as Viper who spits out poison, moonlights as a doctor and gets a mildly amusing riposte to the eternal question “What are you?”: “A chemist, a nihilist, a capitalist, a mutation…” Wolfie gets a few crowd-pleasing lines himself (after throwing a baddie out a high window into the swimming pool below: “How did you know there was a pool there?” “I didn’t!”), and carries out a memorable interrogation in 10 words or less. There’s a fight on the roof of a speeding ‘bullet train’, the warriors dodging girders and plunging a knife in the hot metal (Wolverine plunges his claws) just to avoid being swept off.
All this works; but it’s not enough. Even You Only Live Twice (which was made in 1967, long before audiences started taking mindless excess as their birthright) abandoned Japan for outer space at the climax. I’m no fan of Bigger Is Better – but if you’re going to cut back on scale and spectacle you need clever twists and fleshed-out characters, and The Wolverine has neither. Maybe that’s the problem with adapting comics, which (like TV shows) are able to develop a storyline over many issues; a two-hour film doesn’t have that kind of luxury, so your hero’s liable to emerge as little more than grumpy and a bit of a loner. Someday, perhaps, a superhero movie will go the arthouse route and concentrate solely on mood and psychology (The Dark Knight Rises came close), but The Wolverine – inoffensive, minor, underwhelming – isn’t the film for that kind of bold move. It’s entirely watchable – but it needs to roar, and it doesn’t. This is a sheep in Wolverine’s clothing.
DIRECTED BY James Mangold
STARRING Hugh Jackman, Rila Fukushima, Tao Okamoto
US 2013 126 mins.
