The Wolverine
Why so surly all the time, Wolvie? Aren't you
happy with all the cute Japanese girls fawning
all over you?
dir: James Mangold
2013
Yes, yes, another superhero flick. Your eyes just glazed over thinking about it the way mine did as I was typing it.
The Wolverine, at least, is a more modestly ambitious superhero flick than the four thousand or so we've watched in the last year. In fact, you could argue it’s not even a superhero flick, in that it’s just about a guy with weird hair and the magical ability to heal instantly who kills a bunch of Japanese people. So it's an action flick, more than anything, with nary a mention of the X-Men or most of anything that happened in all of the other films, with the pointed exception being the fate of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) at the end of X-Men 3.
Now, when ranking X-Men flicks, it would seem to make sense to order them from best to worst, but, to my mind, worst to least mediocre is probably a better methodology. The cumbersomely-named X-Men Origins: Wolverine might seem to be the worst, but I have a special hatred for that third turd of a flick, being The Last Stand, which was anything but the last stand, since the tedium rolls on and on.
Let's just agree that both movies are pretty terrible in special, unique ways, and leave it at that. Fortunately, nothing about Origins plays a role here, and I'm assuming in the timeframe this plays out some years after Last Stand.
As the film begins, we're watching curious footage of two bombers approaching a seaside town. Some Japanese guard at a POW prison camp circa 1940s starts going berserk, screaming presumably "The Americans are coming, the Americans are Coming! Quick, abuse the prisoners some more and then quickly commit suicide!" My Japanese is a bit rusty, so I might be slightly inaccurate on that score. Most of the guards are running around like Japanese chickens with their heads artfully decapitated with the precise deadly beauty of a katana. One guard is still trying to kill POWs, as if there's any percentage or value in doing so. One of them, though, seems to value human life a little more than his brethren, as he tries to help the prisoners escape before the bombs drop.
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