In the late 1970s, DC experimented with the notion of a limited series: a comics series that wasn’t an ongoing monthly or bimonthly, but had a set number of issues (usually four or six). The notion proved successful, and it wasn’t long before Marvel did the same, using the shorter-form to spotlight characters who might not have been able to support an ongoing (or who they wanted to test the possibility of an ongoing), or to tell a story that wouldn’t work in any particular monthly book. Now, of course, limited series are the most common form of comics storytelling, but it was brand new and very experimental forty years ago.
One of the first ones Marvel did was to team up two of their hottest talents—Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont with the guy who revived Daredevil, Frank Miller—on the most popular member of the X-Men, Wolverine. This was in 1982, and the four-issue miniseries in question proved to be hugely successful. It remained one of the definitive Wolverine stories, one that has been riffed on, copied, and satirized hundreds of times since—up to and including being the basis of the 2013 movie The Wolverine.
Wolverine’s affinity for Japan was established when the X-Men traveled there following a fight against Magneto in the Antarctic and a trip to the Savage Land. This was one of the “You never told us”/”You never asked” revelations, as they arrive to discover that Logan speaks and reads Japanese. He also meets Mariko Yashida, and they fall in love. The 1982 miniseries ended with their engagement, though the wedding wound up being cancelled due to Mariko being manipulated by Mastermind. Eventually, Mariko died by Logan’s hand at her request after a rival poisoned her.
In the comics, Logan’s backstory includes plenty of trips to Japan, which is where he learned the language. The 1984 miniseries Kitty Pryde & Wolverine revealed that one of Logan’s mentors was a demon ninja named Ogun.
Following the financial (if not critical) success of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Fox green-lit another movie starring the immensely popular Jackman. From the beginning, the intent was to go to Japan and adapt that 1982 miniseries in some form or other, which Jackman has stated is his favorite Wolverine story. Originally, Darren Aronofsky—who had worked with Jackman on The Fountain—was to direct and Christopher McQuarrie was to write. Several issues delayed the production: Jackman was in a production of Les Misérables, Aronofsky couldn’t make the lengthy shooting schedule in Japan work for him and his family and so had to be replaced, and then an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011.
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James Mangold was brought on to direct the script, which adapted not just the seminal miniseries, but also the followup in the pages of 1983’s Uncanny X-Men #172–173 by Claremont and Paul Smith. (Among other things, that was Rogue’s first mission as a member of the team, and also when Storm adopted her “punk” look with the mohawk, a look she would keep for several years.) This addition allowed the characters of Viper and the Silver Samurai to be used.
Aside from Jackman, there are appearances by Famke Janssen as Jean Grey (seen in hallucination/dream form as an ongoing manifestation of Logan’s guilt over having killed her in X-Men: The Last Stand), and in the mid-credits scene, Sir Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Xavier and Magneto, respectively, setting up X-Men: Days of Future Past (which we’ll cover in this rewatch toward the end of the year).
The rest of the characters, though, are brand-new to the movies, though almost all are versions of characters from the two comics stories being adapted: Tao Okamoto as Mariko, Rila Fukushima as Yukio, Hiroyuki Sanada as Shingen, Will Yun Lee (previously seen in this rewatch in Witchblade and Elektra) as Harada, Haruhiko Yamanouchi as Yashida (the only major character who is 100% new for this movie), and Svetlana Khodchenkova as Viper. Originally Jessica Biel was to play Viper, but negotiations broke down and the role was re-cast.
Rather than give the movie version of Logan a lengthy past association with Japan, as the comics character does, this story establishes that this is Wolverine’s first trip there since he fought in World War II, and he has none of the affinity for the culture that he has in four-color form. And other alterations were made, including giving Yukio mutant powers (she’s unpowered, though a phenomenal fighter, in the comics), giving Mariko some martial artist skills, and having Harada and the Silver Samurai be two separate people, with the latter now being a suit worn by Yashida.
“Everyone you love dies”
The Wolverine
Written by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank
Directed by James Mangold
Produced by Lauren Shuler Donner and Hutch Parker
Original release date: July 26, 2013
Logan is living in the Canadian woods, having let himself go to seed. He dreams of the day of the Nagasaki bombing toward the end of World War II, where he was a prisoner of the Japanese. He survived in a bunker, having saved the life of the one soldier who took care to release the prisoners before the bomb dropped. (How Logan remembered any of this when he doesn’t remember anything prior to the 1980s or so after being shot in the head in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
He also dreams of Jean Grey, where we learn that he has given up being a hero—given up living, truly—over guilt at being forced to kill her at Alcatraz.
After he awakens, he finds a camp that has been overrun by a bear, with several people killed. He tracks the bear and finds that it has a poison arrow in its back. Logan puts the bear out of its misery then uses his enhanced senses to track the arrow to its user, who’s in a bar boasting about the bear he shot. However, the poison arrow he used is illegal, and the poison acted slow, making the bear crazy enough to go and kill five people. Logan stabs the hunter with the arrow in question, and then gets into a bar fight—aided by a Japanese woman wielding a katana.
The woman, who is named Yukio, has been looking for Logan for a year. Her employer is Ichiro Yashida, the head of the tech giant Yashida Industries—and also the soldier Logan rescued the day of the Nagasaki bombing. Yashida is dying, and wishes to say his goodbyes to Logan in person. Logan is reluctant to fly to Japan, but agrees to do so. Yukio is also a mutant, with the ability to see someone’s death.
They arrive at the Yashida estate, a sprawling complex outside Tokyo, where Yashida is plugged into a variety of esoteric medical devices, and is under the care of a blonde oncologist named Dr. Green. Logan meets Yashida’s son Shingen and grand-daughter Mariko. Yukio was an orphan who was taken in by the Yashidas after her parents died as a companion for Mariko when they were both children.
After Logan is given a shave, haircut, and bath (by two very stern-looking women wielding scrub brushes and brooms), he sees Yashida. To Logan’s surprise, he doesn’t just wish to pay final respects; he says he has a way to transfer Logan’s healing gifts to another person, er, somehow. He wants to keep living, and he knows that Logan feels the weight of immortality and wishes to die. Logan is a bit gobsmacked by this, and walks away—just in time to see Mariko consider hurling herself over a ledge shortly after being smacked by her father. Logan saves her.
That night, Logan dreams of Grey and also of Dr. Green breathing poison into his face. When he wakes up, he’s informed that Yashida has died.
Logan attends the funeral with Yukio. He tells Shingen that his father was a good man, and Shingen says that his father said the same of Logan, and also makes it clear that he should go the hell home after the funeral.
Watching over the funeral from the rooftops is Kenuichio Harada, Mariko’s ex-boyfriend and someone she still loves.
Logan notices that two of the monks have yakuza tattoos and once Logan makes them, they prematurely enact their plan to kidnap Mariko. Chaos ensues, and Yukio, Harada, and Logan try to rescue Mariko on a chase that leads through downtown Tokyo. Eventually, Logan helps Mariko escape her captors, and they board a bullet train south. Logan was shot and stabbed several times, and to his annoyance, he’s not healing properly.
Several yakuza board the train and go after Mariko, but Logan is able to stop them after a fight that includes a lot of being on the roof of a 300MPH train. Sure.
After the attack, Logan insists they get off the train and they book a room in a love hotel in the crummy part of town. (They wind up in the Mission to Mars room.) Logan stands watch over Mariko and then collapses from blood loss. He’s cared for by the hotel manager’s son, who’s a veterinary student, who at least gets the bullets out. (Logan’s never had to worry about that kind of thing before.) He’s concerned at his lack of healing power.
Mariko reveals that the reason why she tried to kill herself—and why Shingen hit her, for that matter—is because before he died, Yashida revealed that he was leaving his entire financial empire to her rather than his son. Yashida had been fending off advances by the yakuza onto his business for some times, which is probably why they’re after her now.
They continue to Nagasaki, the village where the POW camp used to be during World War II. Logan remembers Yashida giving him the family katana—the same one Yukio brought to Canada. However, Logan returned it, then, asking young Yashida to hold it for him.
Green, who’s really a mutant called Viper, is working with Harada and trying to locate Mariko and Logan. It’s not clear who they’re working for just yet, as Harada fought against the yakuza who took Mariko at the funeral.
Logan and Mariko fall into bed together. The next morning, Mariko is kidnapped by yakuza, and Logan is unable to stop them, but he does manage to keep one kidnapper from escaping. A very brief interrogation reveals that they were hired by Mariko’s fiancé. (A politician in bed with the yakuza! Amazing!) Yukio arrives, despite having been warned by Mariko to stay away, because she has seen Logan die.
They question Mariko’s fiancé, who reveals that he and Shingen plotted to have her killed at the funeral so Shingen would get the company. (Mariko wouldn’t go through with the marriage if she owned the tech giant.) We learn from Shingen that Yashida bled the company dry trying to prolong his life; Shingen shielded the general public from this knowledge that Yashida was almost bankrupt, and he thinks he deserves more than to be shut out of the will.
But before he can kill Mariko, Viper shows up along with Harada and his pet ninjas to take Mariko. Logan and Yukio arrive too late, but Viper left a note saying where to find them. Using the fancy-shmancy medical scanner, Logan realizes there’s a robotic parasite on his heart, which is probably what’s suppressed his healing ability. He cuts himself open and rips it out.
While he’s doing that, Shingen tries to kill him, but Yukio holds him off until Logan can get the parasite out and restore his powers. Once he does so, he fights Shingen to the death. (He’s willing to let him live with being a person who would kill his own daughter, but he refuses to stop fighting, so Logan kills him.)
They travel to a stronghold in the village where Yashida was born. Harada is there, along with his gang of ninjas, Viper, and a giant suit of silver armor—which, it turns out, is keeping Yashida alive. Viper had planned to transfer Logan’s healing ability to Yashida, and now she can finally do it, having used Mariko to lure him there.
The Silver Samurai fights Logan, cutting off his claws with an adamantium sword that also glows hot. He then drills into the bone claws beneath them to siphon off Logan’s healing power (I guess via bone marrow?). Yukio kills Viper, and the Samurai kills Harada, who is appalled at what Yashida has turned himself into. (Little late, there, bucko.)
Mariko grabs two of Logan’s sliced-off adamantium claws and stabs Yashida in the head and neck. When he tries to appeal to her sense of family duty, Mariko simply says that she already buried her grandfather. Logan then says “sayonara” and throws him out a window.
With Shingen dead, Mariko says that she’s now alone, with Yukio her only family. (Her mother, whom we saw at the house and at the funeral early on, has apparently been totally forgotten about.) However, Yukio goes off with Logan, who has come to realize that he’s a soldier, just like Yukio said he was back in Canada when she talked him into going to Japan. They fly off to have adventures.
Two years later, Logan’s going through an airport, only to have everyone around him frozen, and he’s confronted by Charles Xavier, whom he thought was dead, and Magneto. There’s a dire threat to all mutants, that they will all have to deal with in the next movie in the sequence.
“Sayonara”
The original miniseries that this movie takes its primary inspiration from, as well as the two-part followup in the main team book, are classics. I actually like the followup story more, as the miniseries is a little too obviously constructed to play to Frank Miller’s ninja fetish. Plus a lot of the worst clichés that have come to dog the Wolverine character over the last thirty-five years or so come directly from that first miniseries (including the tiresome macho catch phrase about how he’s the best there is at what he does, but what he does isn’t very nice). Far too many Wolverine stories have gone back to that well, most of them pale imitations of the source material.
This movie is no exception. Screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank have taken a fairly simple plot—long-lost father returns to family, turns them into crimelords, our hero must help the woman he loves regain the family honor—and convolute the hell out of it. We’ve got yakuza, we’ve got ninjas, we’ve got family drama, we’ve got a spectacularly unconvincing fight atop a bullet train (mind you, I have no problem with anything Logan did on top of the train, it’s that any of the yakuza thugs lasted more than a second up there), we’ve got different factions of different people wanting people dead, maybe, except maybe just kidnapped or what the hell? If Yashida’s intent was to live, why did he even bother with a will and faking his death? Was he giving it all to Mariko because he intended to use her as a figurehead and was he just a sexist asshole who didn’t realize his grand-daughter was awesome? (Mind you, that would be perfectly possible, but aside from one cryptic bit of dialogue from Viper, it’s totally unclear.)
Speaking of Viper, what the heck is up with her? Apparently, nobody explained the difference between Viper and Poison Ivy to the filmmakers, and also they thought it would be cool for her to shed her skin for, um, reasons? Seriously, why does she shed her skin? And how does it help her heal from an arrow to the chest or a fall from a great height, exactly? Also, shedding her skin removes her hair but somehow keeps her eyebrows…
I have no problem with changes to the source material when adapting to another medium, but it helps immensely if those changes serve a purpose. In the comics, Viper and Silver Samurai were long established as partners, and the latter was part of Clan Yashida, and so was involved in the family doings. Viper doesn’t have that connection, so instead she’s this weird snakey thing who spits poison that sometimes kills and sometimes doesn’t. Seriously, why doesn’t her breathing poison into Shignen’s face kill him? (It’s so Shingen can fight Yukio and Logan, because we don’t have enough action pieces in this movie full of yakuza thugs and ninjas, apparently.)
Harada doesn’t fare much better, as first he’s on Mariko’s side, then he appears to be working against her and Logan on Yashida’s behalf, and then he betrays Yashida, and then he dies and I still haven’t figured out what, exactly, his motivations have been. And unlike Svetlana Khodchenkova, I know that Will Yun Lee can act—I’ve seen him do it lots of places, including in two much worse movies than this in this very rewatch (not to mention assorted excellent TV roles he’s had)—but he’s got nothing to work with here.
Another change to the source material that should work but doesn’t is Yukio’s death-premonition powers. It fits nicely with the themes of death and life and stuff, but it never quite comes together the way it should. At least Yukio has other things to do involving kicking lots of ass (though why they turned her into a Westerner’s idea of an anime character rather than the dark-haired punk she was in the various X-comics is beyond me).
And then there’s Logan lecturing Mariko on not going to a place where people might find them, and they go to the village where the POW camp is where Logan rescued Yashida during the war, which is the first bloody place anybody would look, especially since they know they were on a train headed south. (As Shingen himself says, Japan is a skinny island with trains that only run north-south.)
The hilarious part of all this is that I actually really enjoy The Wolverine. It’s fun to watch. More than any other X-movie, this is the one in which Jackman feels most like the character I’ve been reading in the comics since I was a child. His prior performances ranged from excellent to awful (the latter mostly being in Origins, in which he seemed to be going through the movie in a constant state of constipation), but here, he’s finally firing on all thrusters, perfectly nailing the fierceness, the compassion, the honor, the danger, all mixed in with some serious guilt over having to stab the woman he loves in the last movie. And many of the performances are superb, particularly Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima. (The latter will go on to do equally superbly on Arrow as Katana, while the former will be in Batman v. Superman as Mercy Graves.)
As long as you don’t think about it, and just enjoy the location shooting in Japan and the nifty action scenes with ninjas and stuff, and don’t mind a climax that’s mostly just the hero fighting a CGI creature (a mode we’ll be coming back to, um, a lot as we move forward in this here rewatch), this is an enjoyable film. Just don’t think about it too much.
Like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, this movie was a financial success, and unlike the previous film, a critical one as well. Mangold was brought back to, not only direct, but also co-write Logan, which we’ll cover next week.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is hard at work on Mermaid Precinct, the latest book in his fantasy police procedure series. In anticipation, you can catch up on the previous books, which have been reissued by eSpec Books: the novels Dragon Precinct, Unicorn Precinct, Goblin Precinct, and Gryphon Precinct (all of which have bonus short stories in these new editions), and the short-story collection Tales from Dragon Precinct. Ordering information can be found here.
BTW, when I was researching this, I was rather appalled to realize that the Yukio who appeared in Deadpool 2 is being described as another version of the Yukio who debuted in the ’82 Wolverine miniseries, and whom Rila Fukushima is an adaptation of here. There is basically no resemblance between Shioli Kutsuna’s character in DP2 and either the comics’ Yukio nor this one. I just thought they were giving Negasonic a girlfriend who’s a satire of anime characters that happened to have that name. Bleah. I’ll talk more about that when I hit the Deadpool movies early next year.
On an unrelated note, after DP2 came out, someone did a post on Facebook wondering who besides Ryan Reynolds (Hannibal King, Green Lantern, Deadpool) and Josh Brolin (Jonah Hex, Thanos, Cable) had played three different comics characters in live action, and I got to impress a lot of people by mentioning Will Yun Lee….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I remember finding this one reasonably enjoyable, though I can’t remember any specifics or find any past online comments about it to refresh my memory. It was certainly more coherent and satisfying than the previous Wolverine movie. I liked how it turned the flawed ending of The Last Stand into a positive, using it to drive Logan’s character arc here and thus giving it more weight, rather than just trying to ignore it. And Rila Fukushima made a strong impression.
@1/krad: Thanks to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, we can add two more actors to the three-comics-roles-in-live-action list: Chris Evans (Human Torch, Captain America, Lucas Lee) and Brandon Routh (Superman, Atom, Todd Ingram). Oh, and you could also count John Wesley Shipp (Barry Allen in the 1990 The Flash and Henry Allen and Jay Garrick in the current The Flash). And Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow, The Spirit‘s Silken Floss, and Ghost in the Shell‘s Major Kusanagi).
Christopher: Oh, there’s lots more than that, and we covered a ton, and there were several repeats (thanks to FB’s perpetual compressing of reply threads), but I was the only one who mentioned Lee. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Question – did you like the mission impossible movies especially the second one on? If this was too convoluted for you….
I remember catching this movie on TV at some point and enjoyed it immensely but I am an anime nerd so generally anything with Japan I enjoy. I have also never really expected anything more than a good time form my super hero movies…
For the most part I enjoyed this one. Part of that is my love of the character from the comics and the Mini-series is one of my favorites. Ninja’s and all. (You should check out the What The making fun of it. “Little Nip in the Air tonight.”) My one real let down, outside Logan fighting a robot in the end, was the confrontation in the village. They set up a good action scene and my friends, who were getting a little board by this point, started to get excited. Then..nothing. They do the hook thing but without any combat. Made Wolvie look kinda dumb rather then facing overwhelming odds.
But those are nitpicks. I liked the comments on aging and a look at immortality. Maybe a little more of that and less robots.
dwcole: It wasn’t a question of being too convoluted for me, it was just too convoluted for its own good. I had no trouble following what was happening, but I had trouble figuring out why. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I thought DP2s Yukio was supposed to be a variation of New Xen character Surge but maybe I’m wrong.
Ah, for the good old days of mini-series, when the character would go missing from the main title during the mini-series, and there’d be a follow-up explaining it. If I recall rightly, the Kitty Pryde & Wolverine mini that you mentioned has several scenes of unexpected snow in Japan, because Malekith had opened the Casket of Ancient Winters in Thor’s book, and it was affecting all the other Marvel titles at the time.
I know I saw this in theaters, with low expectations after Origins, which were mostly met. I figured that if it were an adaptation of the original Wolverine mini, it couldn’t be too terrible. I never bothered re-watching, and I figured I was pretty much done with X-Men movies at this point, but we can talk about that more when we get to First Class.
@3 Christopher: Add Dylan Dog to Brandon Routh’s and Ghost World to Scarlett Johansson’s comics-to-film resumes. Does this make them the champs?
This has got me thinking about actors from the movie serial era. Buster Crabbe played Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Thun’da, and, if we count pulp characters well-represented in comics, we can add Tarzan. Jump forward a generation or so and Ron Ely played Tarzan, Doc Savage, and eventually Superman.
@10/wizard clip: I didn’t realize Ron Ely had played a version of Superman in the syndicated Superboy series. I lost track of that show after a while in first run and haven’t gotten around to finding it on DVD yet.
Ben Affleck would make the three-timer cut if you include him playing George Reeves playing Superman in Hollywoodland. But that’s stretching the definition.
Now this is how you make a good Wolverine solo movie. At least until the forgettable third act.
I enjoyed this film a lot more than I thought I would. I feel as though this movie sometimes gets a bad reputation for being between arguably two of the best films in the entire X-Men franchise- First Class and Days of Future Past. And now that I think about it, Keith hasn’t reviewed either of these… timeline hopping galore in weeks to come!
I always like learning about different cultures in films. Specifically, the gangster/mafia-like organisations. And where better than Japan? So this is a movie which essentially boils down, in the first two acts at least, to a fun Wolverine vs. Yakuza movie, with a bullet train sequence thrown in for good measure (Which sequence is better? Mission: Impossible or The Wolverine?) I watched this film thinking, “This is so much better than X-Men Origins, because this film is actually watchable!” Hugh Jackman continues to show off the different parts of Wolverine that will coalesce into his greatest performance yet in Logan next week.
Until the third act.
But even I can understand why mutants were shoehorned into this film. You can’t just have a crazy gangster with tons of money searching for the cure to death, you have to have him build a shiny silver suit for… reasons, and have his assistant be a creepy green lizard woman. I also didn’t appreciate Yukio being written out of any future appearances (until Deadpool 2). In short, you can’t have an X-Men movie without evil mutants. Until Logan (2017) of course. I wonder if that’s another reason why that film was so good. There wasn’t really a “big bad” or “final boss” to fight, as it wasn’t a film about overcoming the odds and beating the bad guy, it was about fighting for survival and sacrificing yourself for a greater goal.
Oh well. I await my Yakuza Gangs of Tokyo spinoff. Make it happen, Scorsese!
Overall, this was a fun movie. It’s not going to make you question your purpose in life or the nature of reality, or prompt heavy philosophical debates. But it will entertain you for 2 hours or so. And that’s what some movies are content to do. And that is no bad thing.
Pretty sure the blue-haired Japanese girl in DP2 is Yuriko, not Yukio, which likely makes her Yuriko Oyama. Aka Surge of the New New X-Men.
I’ve simply given up on expecting the various X-Men films to be consistent with one another. The filmmakers clearly aren’t bothered about it, so why should I be? I enjoy each film (or not) on its own merits as a stand-alone story.
As for this one, I really liked about 2/3 of it. I mainly just wish Viper and the Silver Samurai were a bit less cartoony. The final boss fight was completely underwhelming.
Eugh, I’m so glad we have you to watch and review all these films for us Keith. I remember being immensely unimpresed with Logan in Origin’s and could not bring myself to be more than apathetic about this film, so have never seen it and, thank you for confirming everything I feared about watching it. What a waste of my screen-time it would have been! Thank you!
My main memory of this movie is that it’s fun but a bit shallow. It’s basically a succession of scenes of Wolverine being awesome and beating people up while being immune to death and healing several serious wounds…which makes it really hard to have any sense of jeopardy, so there isn’t any. Even at the end, when he’s supposedly lost his healing ability and is getting a huge amount of punishment from the Silver Samurai, he still seems to recover quickly from everything because Wolverine. But hey, fun watch.
It was nice to finally, after eight years and a couple of lengthy diversions, get some sort of follow-up to The Last Stand, but I would have liked to have seen the effect on characters other than Wolverine. Instead, we get the start of the show hitting a massive re-set button with a mid-credit scene that goes “Magneto has got his power backs and Professor X is alive but still in a wheelchair, somehow. Just run with it.”
@13/Pufnstuf: The IMDb credit for the Deadpool 2 character says “Yukio.”
@16/cap-mjb: From what I’ve seen, it’s kind of in the tradition of Japanese action movies/TV for the heroes to endure an insane amount of physical punishment, injury, and blood loss, yet keep going anyway through sheer willpower, fury, and machismo. I guess The Wolverine was going for the same sort of thing.
cap-mjb: You’re slightly off on the timeline of when Logan had his healing abilities in the movie. He had them at the start of the film, but they started to become suppressed after he visited Yashida — notably during the attempted kidnapping of Mariko at the funeral, where it took him longer than usual to recover — and it got worse as the movie progressed, until they returned to the Yashida estate and he removed the parasite Viper had put on his heart. For the climactic fight with Silver Samurai, he had his full powers restored.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@17/Christopher: “From what I’ve seen, it’s kind of in the tradition of Japanese action movies/TV for the heroes to endure an insane amount of physical punishment, injury, and blood loss, yet keep going anyway […]”.
I’ve seen the same thing in fairy tales and fanfiction. I imagine that it’s some basic human urge in storytelling.
@19 And every action movie hero ever. How many times should John McClane have died during Die Hard, as example? The trope of the hero shrugging off massive amounts of damage is a classic male power fantasy and represented in every culture across the globe.
krad: Sorry if I didn’t make myself clear: I meant during the fight, when the Silver Samurai steals his healing abilities again. It doesn’t seem to have that much affect on him.
I get the argument that others are making, that it’s traditional for action heroes to take an insane amount of punishment and keep going, but when your whole plot is based around a guy who actually can take an insane amount of punishment and keep going losing that ability, doesn’t mean that mean he should…not be able to do it anymore?
@21. You need to look at that fight sequence again. Wolverine very noticeably starts to age to death (and Silver Samurai guy starts to youthen too) as his bone marrow is stolen. Wolvie does not recover until Silver S. stops stealing his bone marrow, at which point his healing returns to normal levels.
@21/cap-mjb: “when your whole plot is based around a guy who actually can take an insane amount of punishment and keep going losing that ability, doesn’t mean that mean he should…not be able to do it anymore?”
No, because he’s still the hero of the story, so of course he has to prevail. It just means that he has to work harder for it and suffer more for it, which from a dramatic standpoint makes it more satisfying and meaningful when he does succeed. Note that Logan also weakens Logan’s healing ability.
@23/CLB: Well, yes, you’re right, he is still the hero and he still needs to prevail. The problem is it never really felt to me like he was having to work harder. He was still doing the same things and it was still working, even though it shouldn’t.
Why is Logan next week? I thought you were doing a chronological look at superhero movies, so there should still be a bunch more X-Men movies before Logan, even just within this franchise.
@25/JoeNotCharles: No, this rewatch has never been strictly chronological. It’s tended to lump things together thematically or by character rather than following a linear sequence.
Regarding the Deadpool 2 Yukio/Yuriko question, I chalk that up to Deadpool as an unreliable narrator. Since the character spends parts of both movies (including the openings) narrating and providing commentary from a point after the action, I just accept that all the odd continuity issues are because the movies we’re seeing are being ‘told’ from Deadpool’s (likely distracted)point of view. Given his man-crush on Logan, I wouldn’t put it past him confusing blue-haired new mutant Yuriko with red-haired Wolverine-sidekick Yukio and coming up with the purple-haired blend-of-character who we see on the screen.
@13 @17 @27 Surge is Noriko Ashida. Yuriko Oyama is Lady Deathstrike. I’ve seen it mentioned (either by the director or Reynolds) that yes, the character in Deadpool 2 is meant to be the same Yukio comic fans are familiar with.
So Yukio’s another duplicate/alternative character. Hardly surprising in this franchise. Deadpool himself is an alternate version of the character, albeit played by the same actor. We’ve had two different versions of plenty of other characters in this series. There are the two different versions of Emma in Origins: Wolverine and First Class. There are two Calibans in Apocalypse and Logan. There are cameo Jubilees in the first three movies and another Jubilee decades earlier in Apocalypse. The Last Stand features prominent or bit roles by multiple characters who were interpreted differently later on — mainly Angel, but also Bolivar Trask, Moira McTaggart, and Psylocke. Not to mention that its version of Hank McCoy didn’t mesh with the talking-head TV-cameo Hank that Steve Bacic played in X2.
You also had a talking head cameo by Sebastian Shaw in X2, only for First Class to reveal he should have been dead 40 years!
I guess you can’t blame a franchise for ignoring a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo version of a character, especially one not named onscreen, if they want to do a different version later on. Heck, I never knew there was a bit-player version of Psylocke in The Last Stand until after Psylocke was announced as being a character in Apocalypse.
This has happened in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well, though only between the TV and movie divisions rather than within either one. Doctor Strange has a bit character who’s supposed to be Tina Minoru, but Runaways features a different Tina Minoru and the movie character (who was only named in the credits) is retroactively assumed to have been someone else. And a member of Killmonger’s gang in Black Panther was supposed to be Tilda Johnson/Nightshade, but Luke Cage season 2 did its own separate version of her, so the movie character was renamed Linda (a rare case of the movies actually acknowledging something the TV division did, if only through avoidance).
X-Men movie continuity is somehow even more convoluted and nonsensical than the comics.
I liked The Wolverine pretty well. The quiet moments worked better for me than the action did; it felt like a nice meditative movie that just sort of goes bonkers in the last twenty minutes. I know that it’s based off actual comics, but in retrospect it feels like a trial run for the superior Logan. That’s not such a bad thing.
I thought that this one was pretty damn good up until it falls off the rails in the third act (but that was the result of studio interference wasn’t it?).
What I like best about the movie is that they depowered Logan’s healing factor (for a while at least) so that it is more like Wolvie’s from the comics. What people who only know Wolverine from the movies don’t know is that in the comics he gets the shit kicked out of him all the time. He doesn’t just heal any damage immediately, it actually takes some time for him to heal and he has to deal with the damage taken while fighting. Which I thought the middle part of the this movie showed really well.
Take the mini series for example, in the very first issue Shingen hands Logan’s ass to him and throws him out in the streets where he has to be rescued by Yukio. Or the fight that happens in the X-Men issues krad was talking about in the review (which, as I’ve said before is one of my all time favorite X-Men stories, ever). The Silver Samurai and Viper kick the shit out of Wolverine, so much so that he almost dies when he gives his healing factor to Rogue (which they used for the first X-Men movie). Or the fight with the Brood queen.
By the way, issue 118 that krad was also talking about, the one where the X-Men (well, most of them, the team was split from Phoenix and Beast and thought dead) end up in Japan and Logan meets Mariko for the first time, was the first issue of the X-Men I ever read. Fell in love instantly and bought every issue after for almost twenty years. When the guy with the big glasses asked “You read Japanese? I didn’t know.” and the guy with the funny hair and crazy sideburns replied “Yup. You never asked.” the guy with the funny hair and crazy sideburns immediately became my favorite character. I was known to be a bit of a smart ass myself, what can I say I was already a huge fan of Han Solo by this time.
The less said about the treatment of the Silver Samurai and Viper here the better. And don’t get me started on the whole heating up adamantium thing.
One last thing krad, I will never get tired of Wovie telling me that he is the best there is at what he does but what he does isn’t very nice.
Quoth billiam: “One last thing krad, I will never get tired of Wovie telling me that he is the best there is at what he does but what he does isn’t very nice.”
Heh. I got sick of it the second time I read it, which was during the Brood story. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Quoth JoeNotCharles: “Why is Logan next week? I thought you were doing a chronological look at superhero movies, so there should still be a bunch more X-Men movies before Logan, even just within this franchise.”
Nope. The general order is chronological, but in appropriate groupings. Here’s the list of release dates of each movie I’ve rewatched in the order I’ve rewatched them:
1951
1966
1978
1981
1983
1987
1977
1978
1979
1979
1974
1975
1984
1982
1989
1989
1992
1995
1997
1977
1977
1988
1989
1990
1994
1996
2000
2005
1990
1991
1993
1989
2004
2008
1991
1996
1996
1995
1995
2012
1994
2005
1999
2003
1997
1997
1986
1998
1990
1994
1996
1997
1987
2008
1998
2002
2004
2000
2003
2006
2006
2003
2002
2004
2007
2003
2005
2004
2008
2000
2005
2005
2005
2005
2007
2005
2008
2012
2007
2012
2006
2009
2009
2013
So not strictly chronological in the least. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
ahhh… that’s a lot of reviews mate
It has its flaws, but it works pretty well overall. And it works because it’s built on a reasonably strong character foundation.
When this was first announced, I had little hope that Fox would ever greenlight a sequel to X3. By going prequel with Origins and then First Class, it was as if they’d abandoned any plans of tackling the characters’ futures.
So, when I first heard this was going to be a direct sequel to The Last Stand, (and that Famke Janssen was going to reprise her role) I was thrilled. I knew the act of killing Jean could be a major driving force for Wolverine, if properly mined. For the most part, Mangold and Scott Frank make the right call by driving Logan away from civilization and the X-Men, slowly driving him insane with memories of murder.
Even though Logan murdered Jean as a means of protecting humans and mutants from certain doom, it never strays far away from Logan’s oldest inner conflict: that he has an inner animal he has a hard time keeping in check. The movies never explored this nearly as much as they could have.
I really enjoy seeing him in Japan. Not that the plot matters much. It’s a journey of self-discovery for him, trying to find himself again. Some beautiful eastern background visuals don’t hurt either.
I’m surprised it took them this long to take out Logan’s healing factor and use it as a means of jeopardy. It mostly works, even though it carries little consequence in the long term.
And I’ll admit a bit of guilty pleasure with the train scene. It makes zero sense, but I can’t help but enjoy the over-the-top sensibility employed. Reminds me of Kill Bill Vol. 1, and how cartoony that could be sometimes. For whatever reason, putting Yakuza with broad action and comedy seems to work well.
If only the third act were half as good as the rest of the film. There was no need to do such an overcoreographed final sequence. Logan’s battle against the Silver Samurai isn’t nearly as effective thanks to that.
And that memorable end credits scene had me primed for Days of Future Past. It took them 14 years to finally get there!
As far as side characters go, I’m bummed Bryan Singer and Simon Kinberg didn’t use Yukio on DOFP. She was an effective secondary hero.
Technical glitch alert for the moderator: The comments are not showing up for me in Firefox, and I can’t post a comment from there either. I tried clearing my cache/cookies for the site and logging back in — no change. I’m posting this in Chrome.
I never saw this one – I do remember when it came out, but I never realized it was meant to be a sequel to Last Stand (or that it provides a tiny bridge to Days of Future Past). It just seemed like Wolverine already had so many movies about him (and even the other X-Men movies focused on him quite a bit) that this was just another drop in the bucket. I might check it out sometime though.
Like you I enjoy watching this film just because it’s, to me, FUN. Perhaps my love of Japan (I love the scene running through the gaming area, I felt like I was back in Japan) helps. That and I came away from the film in love with Mariko. Just a fun escape for me if I am down.
After giving up on there being a great X-Men movie after the let-down of the Last Stand, the mild disappointment of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which is a great portrayal of comic Wolverine from the early 90’s -not that that is a good thing however) and the bizarre retro action of First Class (which I like but which doesn’t really feel like a X-Men movie to me) I was sort of tempted back due to this being The Japanese Adventure. I watched it, I wasn’t disappointed, I wasn’t a massive squealing fanboy of excitement on the carpet either though.
I was disappointed in that it didn’t quite portray the notion of Logan being an animal/having no honour that the source material put across, it was after all this mini-series that introduced Claremont’s view of Wolverine as the failed Samurai (but it did have the Ninjas I guess and I suppose you can say Shingen’s view of him in the movie portray that upon reflection). I realised that you probably wouldn’t get a faithful retelling but it did do so much right that any complaints about the action movie by the numbers third act doesn’t really matter. But to those who don’t like this movie or who haven’t watched it you are missing out because finally we get to see Wolverine as he always should have been. It’s hard to see this Logan and the Logan who gets thrown about a lot in the Original X-Men movies as being the same character.
True he’s only fighting humans in this but this movie could have established Logan as one of the all-time great action heroes even if he wasn’t a comic character. By which I mean that this movie stands in my mind with the best works of Eastwood, Stallone and Schwartzenegger (and yes Stallone did do some great work). Maybe that’s what I am trying to say, that this is a great Action hero movie if not a great Superhero one.
Shame they edited out the scene in the plane where he gets the actual Wolverine costume though, I thought it looked good. I can understand why they edited it out as Hugh Jackman Logan is a vest and jeans but still, it wasn’t the blue and yellow spandex nightmare I feared it may have been. Still, in my own little fantasy world of the 2 years where Yukio and Wolverine travel the world, he does wear that at least once before dumping it in disgust with some mention of it “being about tights.” (Thank you Joss Whedon)
Oh yeah, I always thought they did the train sequence just so they could have Wolverine flying through the air claws extended like in the famous Jim Lee cover and Marc Silvestri 90’s X-Men game box ad, it is the iconic Wolverine image after all.
I remember this movie felt to me like a random “retired tough guy goes to Japan and fights Yakuza and ninja” film that just happened to star Hugh Jackman with claws, and had a mecha at the end. Not as cheesy as the previous Wolverine film, but still completely forgettable. Removing Logan’s long association with Japan takes away the character’s “ronin” side, one of the things in the comics that made him more than just a loose cannon (even if it’s sometimes verdone).
And I wish Jackman had worn the alternate ending costume-in-a-suitcase in a film.
@1 – krad: Yeah, I’ve been wishing that the Yukio in DP2 is supposed to be Surge, even with the different name and other changes.
@13 – Pufnstuff: The girl in DP2 is clearly called “Yukio”, and her name is repeated many times in one of the running jokes of the film (Hi Wade! / Hi Yukio!). And Surge’s name is “Noriko Ashida”, “Yuriko Oyama” is Lady Deathstrike, as blackpariaha has said.
@33 – billiam: Unfortunately, in the comics Wolverine has also become (and independently from the movies) a super fast healing machine.
Hmm. you know, you could really make a badass anime out of Wolverine’s life
Someday
*sniff*
@@@@@ billiam
Man, Clint Eastwood would’ve sold the shit outta that line in his prime!!
@43/J.U.N.O.: “Hmm. you know, you could really make a badass anime out of Wolverine’s life
Someday”
A Wolverine anime was made in 2011. I cannot speak to its badassness, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Anime#Wolverine