Cinemutants - The Wolverine (2013)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2013, it’s The Wolverine. Years after The Last Stand, Logan (Hugh Jackman) is in exile, alone and haunted by the ghost of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). Invited to Japan by the ailing Ichiro Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), Logan finds himself entangled in a conspiracy involving Yashida’s son Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), his granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto), and the precognitive mutant Yukio (Rila Fukushima). 

1. Eternity can be a curse. After thirteen years and six outings as Logan (counting his cameo last week), Hugh Jackman gives his best performance yet in The Wolverine. Wolverine has always been a creature of rage, and in this one we get to see that rage turned inward – for the first act, at least. Like any good soldier, Wolverine only needs a mission to turn himself around, something I suspect will come into play in Deadpool & Wolverine, when we meet another Logan broken by failure. But it’s not all heartbreak here, because Jackman also gives us some of the best action sequences with Wolverine, including a sensational fight on a bullet train and (in the extended cut) a lengthy battle with ninjas on motorbikes. And while Jackman is much taller than the Wolverine of the comics, he takes full advantage of that size difference and owns it in this movie.
2. Kuzuri. In the comics, Wolverine has a long history with Japan, having trained there before his days with the X-Men and drifting back every so often to settle some bit of unfinished business. The Wolverine relocates Logan’s history with Japan into his present, tying him in an arresting opener to the bombing of Nagasaki before setting the bulk of the film in Japan. There’s some question about whether Logan is a kuzuri (an animal) or a ronin (a samurai without a master), and there’s some room to wonder whether Yukio’s gift is a mutation or just a spiritual connection to the future. In some ways, this movie anticipates Peach Momoko’s recent work in the Marvel Universe, which reimagines mutants as yokai (cf., Demon Days, Ultimate X-Men). Done carefully, this cultural crossover enriches the character and keeps him from growing stale.
3. Everyone you love dies. The Wolverine plays with one of the most stalwart archetypal plots in superhero comics – take away everything recognizable about the hero, break him down to nothing, and build him back up. On a meta level, the film even acknowledges that The Last Stand and Origins didn’t go very well, and so we’re rooting for a redemption of the franchise and its erstwhile protagonist. First Class was a step in a new direction, but The Wolverine had the unenviable task of picking up from an unloved film and playing the X-ball where it lay. (Director James Mangold would tread a similar path with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a decade later, following on the unpopular Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.) So we have a Logan without a team, without a purpose, and even without his healing factor. Who, then, is the Wolverine? It’s immensely satisfying once Logan embraces the mantle that had been used to taunt and torment him.
4. We don’t all have claws. While I don’t think too many people would thrill at the return of mutant poison mistress Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), I was reminded on this rewatch that we were really robbed of more Yukio. Rila Fukushima would get her superhero due playing Katana for a few years on Arrow, but The Wolverine set up a fun dynamic with Yukio as Logan’s backup, his confidant, and the closest thing to a friend he permits himself (almost reminiscent, incidentally, of the relationships Wolverine has had with young X-Men like Kitty Pryde and Jubilee). We meet a very different Yukio in Deadpool 2 – either due to time-travel shenanigans or just two people having the same name – and Days of Future Past will imply that this timeline doesn’t exist any longer. But since exiles from dead continuities are sort of the TVA’s whole thing, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this Yukio makes a return; someone who can see the future might come in handy if the TVA are pruning timelines. 
5. Ghosts of future past. I had entirely forgotten that Famke Janssen plays a not-insubstantial role in The Wolverine, which makes me wonder if we might see her pop up in the new Deadpool movie as some multiversal variant of the Phoenix (she stands a better chance, at least, than Sophie Turner, whose Dark Phoenix is less than fondly remembered). There’s certainly a sense of the unresolved in the relationship with Logan, as well as the question of whether she’s just a memory or a spectral vision from beyond. What I hadn’t forgotten, however, was the first-rate post-credits scene which reintroduces Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart into the mix; though we saw them three weeks ago, it had been seven years for moviegoers (not counting Stewart’s CGI cameo in Origins). This is one of those gold-standard teasers, and it had me wanting to cue up Days of Future Past immediately; we’ll have to wait a week for that one.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is The Wolverine overshadowed by other, better X-films? Case in point, we’ll do the time warp again next week with arguably the franchise’s finest hour, Days of Future Past. (And for those playing the home game, I’ll be watching “The Rogue Cut” this time around.)

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

It’s a curious thing that three Indiana Jones films (of five) were conceived to be grand finales for the franchise – from riding off into a literal sunset at the end of The Last Crusade, to a reunion and a wedding in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, now Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny promises that, yes, this finally is the last outing for our beloved fortune-and-glory seeker. While not quite living up to its predecessors, and neither as masterful as director James Mangold’s last franchise elegy, Logan, Dial of Destiny is still far and away a worthy and fun addition to the Indiana Jones saga.

It's 1969, and Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is feeling long in the tooth by the time his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) pays him a visit. Helena has come in search of the artifact that drove her father (Toby Jones) mad – Archimedes’ Dial, which is said to possess the power of time travel. But hot on their heels is the Nazi fugitive Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who wants to use the dial to correct the mistakes of history.

 

Dial of Destiny begins with a roaring twenty-minute prologue, in the style of Last Crusade’s “lost adventure” opener. Immediately, it’s a real treat to see Indiana Jones in his prime, punching Nazis and barely squeezing out of a scrape. It’s at once bittersweet, given that any of us would happily have watched Harrison Ford punch Nazis in fifteen more films, but it is also a reminder that this franchise’s best days are a ways behind it, ensconced in the nostalgia and innocence of its serial pulp roots. All of which is not to say that Dial of Destiny is necessarily bad or even a net negative; particularly in this opening sequence but really throughout, Dial feels like classic Indy, and that aura of impactful crunchy action persists, as when a character’s head is imperiled during a motorcycle chase or when another is impaled by a cart full of timber.

 

Despite his ‘grumpy old man’ reputation, Ford has done heroic and laudatory work revisiting his old genre standbys, putting Dial in the good company of The Force Awakens and especially Blade Runner 2049. Here, Indiana Jones is worse for the wear and wearier of the world, but he seems not to have lost a step as far as his chippy personality and improvisational approach to action setpieces. He also gets a chance to deliver a fairly emotional sequence aboard a sailboat, and the film’s conclusion is a fitting and proper sendoff for a character as beloved as this one.

 

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a snarky delight as Helena, more cutthroat capitalist than proper archaeologist, and Mads Mikkelsen is inspired casting as a seething Nazi holdout. The rest of the cast, though, amounts to a series of extended cameos – a shame for the return of John Rhys-Davies as Sallah and for the advent of Toby Jones as a skittish British professor – which does, I suppose, mean that the film can properly be about Indy, Helena, and Voller. But the greatest return of all is John Williams helming the score one last time. As fun as the film was, Williams provides that emotional core, and I found myself stamping my feet with excitement as he reprised a few of the action cues from Last Crusade’s exemplary sequences. So too for the moments I felt my eyes welling up – that, I promise you, was all Williams.

 

At just over two and a half hours, though, Dial of Destiny is a good sight longer than the other four Indiana Jones films, and I regret to say that you do feel it. It’s somber in places where it needs to be, and its action sequences are dynamite (once, quite literally), but its third act is a little baggy, and it does take a bit of time to get there. I mean no offense to James Mangold on this one, but the toughest thing about Dial is that it isn’t directed by Steven Spielberg. Few franchises are as inextricably linked to one singular director as this one is, and Dial lacks that precision filmmaking, that gee-whiz enthusiasm that Spielberg brings better than anyone. Mangold was hand-picked by Spielberg to helm the finale, and he’s a solid director in his own right, yet there is something about Dial that never wholly feels of a piece with its predecessors. 

 

Perhaps I’ll change my tune on that count once I’ve seen Dial at home a few times – because I do intend to see this one again and again. There are some sequences in it that are truly breathtaking, and my personal jury is still out about the film’s big MacGuffin-y climax. Ultimately Dial of Destiny is an exercise in measured restraint everywhere but its action scenes; it’s not as wistfully nostalgic as it could have been, but nor is it as tight and punchy as one might expect from this franchise. Or perhaps it’s just that I haven’t seen it fifteen billion times like I have Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perhaps, once I can quote vast swaths of it in the way that I’ve committed long sections of Last Crusade to memory, Dial of Destiny will become a classic. Yet at the end of the day, it is an Indiana Jones movie, and a good enough one, at that.

 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, language, and smoking.” Directed by James Mangold. Written by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp, and James Mangold. Starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, and Mads Mikkelsen. 

Logan (2017)

Does anyone else feel old when we consider that Fox has been making X-Men movies for seventeen years? I haven’t missed a one among the ten – and yes, Logan brings us squarely into double digits (the Marvel Cinematic Universe, incidentally, hit that milestone in six years and will double it by 2018). But fortunately it’s only the characters who are showing their age, as director James Mangold, his performers, and the story are as fresh and vibrant as can be, sending out Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine with what is undoubtedly his strongest solo outing yet.

In the year 2029, the world has seen the last of the mutants, with only Logan (Hugh Jackman), the ailing Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and his caretaker Caliban (Stephen Merchant) left. Though Logan is looking to rest as his healing factor shows signs of slowing down, the arrival of a mysterious child (newcomer Dafne Keen) forces him to unsheathe his claws to protect her from the forces pursuing her.

Logan is not a film that is likely to leave you cheering in your seats, eagerly awaiting for a post-credits tease for the next chapter in the story. (Indeed, there’s nothing after the credits.) Instead, it’s a complete package that left me stuck in my seat for a little bit as I processed what I’d just seen. It’s a film, and I say that as someone who loves the popcorn movie installments of the X-Men franchise just as well (well, maybe not all of – or even much of – The Last Stand). Whether it’s the best of the X-Men films makes me wonder if critics have forgotten the masterful X2: X-Men United, certainly the best movie about the X-Men as such, but Logan is certainly the best of the Wolverine trilogy and the best work done with the character.

I’m not, then, terribly interested in ranking this film among the X-Men canon, nor do I care much for whether the comparison to The Dark Knight is an apt one. (For my money, Nolan’s middle Bat-film is such a slick piece of work that I think we can safely enjoy one without comparison to the other.) What I care about are the characters, which is something I haven’t often felt about the X-Men movies; sure, it’s been a hoot to see Jean Grey and Beast alongside Magneto and Jubilee, but the X-films have always leaned perhaps a little too heavily on the benefit of fifty years of source material without doing the yeoman’s work of characterization on film. “Whoa, I care about this,” I remarked to myself near the end of the film’s second act, due in large part to the careful precision of character development on display in Logan. Rather than rely on the previous films’ relationship dynamics – or worse, their messy continuity – Logan takes that all as prologue to (re)introduce Logan and Charles as caretaker and curmudgeon.

Jackman and Stewart are doing what is demonstrably their best and most interesting work as these characters, in part because of how different they are from the Wolverine and Professor X we know, but also because of how deftly they manage to convey that difference without losing the core of the characters – the sublimated pain and rage of one, and the desperate need to nurture of the other. Fitting so comfortably into this dynamic is Dafne Keen, who’s so compelling as the girl who would be X-23 (and currently the All-New Wolverine) that I’m genuinely excited to see her grow into the role. That Keen’s role is largely silent speaks volumes (pun intended) for her dexterity as a performer.

I had worried that those who cried “Too dark!” at Batman v Superman might prove the dominating voice in the conversation about the evolution of superhero film as a genre, but between Logan and Deadpool I am gladdened to see a contingent of directors who, in very different ways, are challenging what superhero movies can be by allowing the characters, not the merchandise, to dictate the tenor of the narrative. The fact is that Logan is brutally violent, unflinching in its use of profanity to illustrate the frustrations of our protagonists, and it earns its R-rating with that breathless “wow” feeling.

We’ve got at least five more superhero movies coming this year, but the bar’s been set pretty high by Logan. It’s also a crying shame that Jackman and Stewart are signing off with this one, because one does leave the theater with the acute sense of loss at the X-Men movies that could have been if only they’d been this good from the start. In that sense, Logan is like The Dark Knight, in that it shows us what’s possible when a filmmaker is allowed to take these characters in fresh directions. Sayonara, bub. We hardly knew ye.

Logan is rated R for “strong brutal violence and language throughout, and for brief nudity.” Directed by James Mangold. Written by James Mangold, Scott Frank, and Michael Green. Starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Richard E. Grant, Eriq La Salle, and introducing Dafne Keen.