The Wolverine (2013)

Director James Mangold's film features some breathtakingly suspenseful action sequences, exquisite production and costume design and colorful characters, some of whom register more powerfully than others. It's a relief to come across a blockbuster that finds a location and stays there, rather than hopping desperately from one place to the nextIt restores the tarnished lustre to this most fan-beloved of Marvel characters by doing precisely what Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's near-sacred 1982 run did: It pumps some feeling into the guy along with his muscles and steel talons. Too quickly the random fights pile up, so much yakuza thugs who forgot to wear chain mail that morning -- and you yearn for the film that might have been.

 

Mangold front-loads the action, but near the end there's a first-rate fight atop a bullet train between Wolverine/Logan and some especially pesky ninjas. It puts the train fights in the recent The Lone Ranger to shame. Just as comic-book movie fatigue was starting to set in, along comes The Wolverine to revive a moribund summer of superheroes. After this Origins film, the Wolverine character had the potentially of crashing and burning. Thankfully, it did not. Looks like someone decided to take the Wolverine spin-off series seriously. It's Hugh's movie, and he's in formidable form, whether chatting with the dead Jean Grey, skewering multiple baddies, clinging to a bullet train's roof or performing seriously ouchy auto-surgery.

 

Man, Wolverine is a boring character. Never has that been made more apparent than in "The Wolverine." Ultimately, this is Jackman's film, and he plays the reluctant but fearsome hero perfectly. Moderadamente eficaz, mas não deixa de ser sintomático que sua melhor cena seja aquela que surge apenas durante os créditos finais... the movie simply doesn't have anything interesting or relevant to say about the iconic Marvel character.

 

Slick, entertaining, super-hero thrill ride, the only quibbles are its length - every big film these days seems to be 20 minutes too long - and its 3D conversion. Really, it's another example of the marginal difference that process often makes. A superior, even adult Marvel Comics adaptation that plays almost like a straight gangster/yakuza thriller for much of its length, until the obligatory climactic superhero/supervillain dust-up. For all the up and down The Wolverine is definitely more up than down more of the time... It still doesn't feel like the definitive adventure for the character, but there's potential for the character still. The Wolverine can proudly take its place with most of the rest of its comic book brethren this summer - high atop the mountain of the Massively OK. The movie contemplates Logan's existential dilemma for all of two seconds before getting to the slashing and bashing.

 

a murky and muddled thing saved, such as it is, by Hugh Jackman's steadfast commitment a man's mute, impotent melancholy and the many females around him engaged in the maintenance of their separate, disintegrating orbits. After 2009′s bland X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it's refreshing to see Hugh Jackman inhabit the character in a movie that actually understands his inner conflict. The Wolverine is surprisingly dour and uneventful, at least by the carnage-n-claptrap standards of modern superhero films Much of the reason Wolverine has become everyone's favorite Canadian mutant is because, despite his origins in the Marvel Universe, he doesn't act much like a superhero.