James Beech reviews The Wolverine.
The Wolverine (M)
Starring: Hugh Jackman (Les Miserables), Tao Okamoto, Rila Fukushima
(Karma: A Very Twisted Love Story),
Director: James Mangold (Knight and Day).
Screening: Reading Cinemas Queenstown - visit www.readingcinemas.co.nz
for times.
This is the sixth time Jackman has pounded the gym, grown the sideburns and donned the claws to play the popular Marvel comics character since X-Men 13 years ago, and his snarling, sarcastic outsider has become the adamantium backbone of the multitude of superhero franchises.
After the unfairly maligned X-men Origins: Wolverine (2009), which featured Wakatipu as the Canadian Rockies, The Wolverine is a sequel to the slapdash X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), which left the X-Men universe in such a mess, the only way forward was back, in X-Men: First Class (2011).
The breakout star of the original trilogy finally gets his own standalone tale to tell and it starts with a real-world bang when the virtually immortal Logan, or the Wolverine, saves Japanese soldier Yashida from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Decades later, Logan is in self-imposed exile in the wilds of his native Canada and tormented by dreams of lost love Jean Grey (Famke Janssen).
He is summoned to Tokyo and the deathbed of Yashida, who built a business empire and offers to take away Logan's immortality so he can live and die after a normal life.
However, Logan becomes shogun when he becomes embroiled in corporate skulduggery and family intrigue while bloodlessly slicing and dicing yakuza mobsters and ninjas to protect on-the-run Mariko (Okamoto), Yashida's beautiful granddaughter and heir.
Despite the different culture in which The Wolverine is set, the limitations of the character are starting to show.
Only so many fighting moves with claws are possible and his mysterious amnesiac back story was revealed in X-Men: Origins.
Logan lacks the smarts of Batman, the variety of powers of Superman and the wisecracking bravado of Iron Man.
The grit and high stakes of The Dark Night trilogy are missing, fish-out-of-water humour is forgotten and Logan now has no fellow mutants to spark off.
Jackman owns the role more than ever, but a ponderous plot, Japanese cliches and an excess of computer graphics blunt the claws of The Wolverine.
