The Wolverine

The poster child of the mutants is back, and out to kick some serious komono. Can the X-men franchise keep the momentum of First Class?

'The Wolverine', easily enough, follows the character of the same name. Wolverine, aka Logan, aka James Howlett, is living in the wilderness, hiding from the world after the events of X-Men 3. He is located by a man he saved while he was a POW in a Japanese prison in WWII. He is offered the chance at walking away from his powers, to end his mortal suffering.

This movie was a pretty big miss for me.

Acting is what you would expect from the run-of-the-mill X-Men movies, not the quality First Class teased us with. While Hugh Jackman may have delivered a performance slightly above X3 or Wolverine: Origins, the parts of him that shown we overshadowed by the overall drab pall of 'action movie acting' (I like to call it 'Statham-itis') where the only emotions were pretty much anger, fear, and the punch line.

The cinematics were pretty decent. Color palettes changed pretty drastically over the movie, but changed to adopt to environments, which is nice. My only beef is that it sometimes looked as though the placement of where Wolverine's claws come out were inconsistent...while this seems like kind of a nit-picky thing to look at, Wolverines claws are almost a separate character, how important they are to his identity, so even an inconsistency of half an inch is huge here.

The writing was pretty disappointing. I honestly would have trashed the script for something else. I think referencing the gigantic bomb of X3 as often as they did in the movie was a horrible decision. I think X-Men: First Class was a clean slate for 20th Century Fox to try and springboard back into the super hero genre, but referencing possibly the worst of all the mutant movies as a central plot theme was basically hamstringing themselves. There are literally hundreds of storylines revolving specifically with Logan, but they chose to build a story on the wreckage of a catastrophe, instead of a solid foundation.

Final Judgement:

The Wolverine took a step back from the leap forward the X-Men: First Class gave us. par for the course acting and an incredibly disappointing story make this a movie that you should wait to netflix. Luckily though, we can all look forward to X-Men: Days of Future Past to try and pick up the ball where Wolverine dropped it

Score:★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆