REVIEW - 'The Wolverine'

"The Wolverine" (PG-13) ***

Set years after the events of "X-Men:  The Last Stand", "The Wolverine" has Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) wandering the wilderness and being haunted by his past.  While at a bar he is visited by a woman named Yukio (Rila Fukushima), who was commissioned by her employer Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi) to bring back to Japan the one they call 'The Wolverine'.  Yashida's life was saved during World War II during the Nagasaki bombing by Logan/Wolverine and currently he is on his deathbed.  In addition to wanting to finally give him his sword as a Thank You gift for saving his life during the war, he also has an offer for Logan:  He can make Logan a mortal again and end his eternity.  While that is going on, there is a power struggle in the business as gangsters come after Yashida's granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto), who is set to succeed her grandfather as the head of the business.  There's a lot going on here for a superhero movie, but at least it doesn't get as complicated or convoluted as "Spider-man 3".

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine is always fun to watch and once again he delivers a great performance in his 6th time playing the role.  All of the other actors also do well in their roles.  The action scenes are thrilling and fun for the most part, and it does something that "X-Men Origins:  Wolverine" failed to do:  Focus on Wolverine!  "Origins" has a lot of 'X-Men' character cameos scattered throughout the movie and every side trip to point out the next cameo gets a little tiresome after a while before it jumps the shark with a mostly CGI Patrick Stewart reprising his role as Professor X, digitally enhanced to make him look younger.....yeah.  But enough about "Origins" for now.  "The Wolverine" is also well scored and something else I have to point out is that this is a dark movie.  Most of the action, except for a fight atop a bullet train and at a funeral, is set at night.  And rather than being distracting, it helps the movie out.  Think of the fight in the skyscraper in Shanghai in "Skyfall".  You could only see the silhouettes of Daniel Craig and Ola Rapace against blue lights from an advertisement on a nearby building.  Sure, you can't see much, but it's so well shot and so great to look at that it helps the movie rather than hinders it.  Much is the case with the nighttime action scenes in "Wolverine".

As far as negatives go, some of the action scenes are a little hastily edited so sometimes I couldn't really tell what was happening.  It is a little bit long, and my last nitpick is a bit spoiler-heavy so I'm going to save this last bit of negativity for when I do that blog post.  It involves something towards the end of the movie.

Now, I have never read any of the X-Men comics so I cannot compare this to how faithful it was to the comics. But I have seen all of the live action 'X-Men' movies and comparing this to all those, well,  this is the 6th one so it'll just be better if I listed out the others and gave my opinion on them.
            "X-Men" - Special effects don't really hold up well, but it's an all right movie.
            "X2" - Once again, the special effects don't really hold up well.  It's an okay movie.
            "X-Men:  The Last Stand" - I've only seen this once, but I thought it was a lot of fun.
            "X-Men Origins:  Wolverine" - It's dumb, but it's watchable.
            "X-Men:  First Class" - This is a great comic book movie, bolstered by the lead performances of James McAvoy as Professor X and Michael Fassbender as Magneto.
So where does "The Wolverine" fall in with the others?  It's a lot better than "Origins" that's for sure.  Heck, the opening scene of "Wolverine" in Nagasaki is a lot better than anything in "Origins".  I do like this better than the trilogy, but this is not as good as "First Class".

"The Wolverine" is a dark, action filled, character filled, plot heavy superhero movie that is actually good with another great performance from Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine.  "Wolverine" doesn't get convoluted in it's own plot, nor does it dumb things down.  In the middle of the end credits there is a teaser for next year's "X-Men:  Days of Future Past".  Not exactly a title that rolls of the tongue, but I'm looking forward to it.  But at the same time, I'm a little weary about it.  But more about that later.