Grade: B+

Superhero movies are at an interesting crossroad. The sheer novelty of seeing our favorite heroes on screen, in live-action, has worn off. The days where the joy and exhilaration of just seeing them fly through the sky, swing above buildings, or materialize from the shadows are over with. Film makers seem conflicted about how to handle this problem. For the most part, their answer is more, more, more. There must always be a global catastrophe looming, and the fate of every human being must be in peril. This is a pretty easy way to up the stakes without really trying too hard. Human annihilation not enough for you? Then they’ll give you more superheroes, more villains. Just keep stacking more of them on a single screen and the fan boys will be appeased. The fan boys must be appeased. The other, smarter, solution is to scale things down and just tell a good story in what is already a rich and entertaining universe. Luckily, The Wolverine does just this, cutting the mutant total down and not threatening genocide (An interesting note on that is the movie starts with the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, which is the single greatest threat of genocide in the real world, but little more than a flash in the pan in a world with god-like beings constantly at war with one another). What we get instead is a more personal story about the indestructible clawed man with the bad temper, a simple save the girl and revenge kind of tale with fun twists and turns, which is exactly what we want from Wolverine.

Hugh Jackman resumes his now iconic role, though the character is a little different from the last time we saw him. This movie takes place sometime after the events of X-Men 3, and Logan, no longer acknowledging The Wolverine side of him, has retreated into a self-imposed exile. He dreams of Jean Grey, the girl he loved and killed to stop her from destroying the world, every night and is riddled with too much guilt to face his past. An invitation to say goodbye to an old friend on his death bed brings him to Japan where, naturally, nothing is as it seems. He encounters a bitter power struggle over Asia’s largest corporation, beautiful women, and ninja assassins. Through a suppression of his powers, Logan must face his own mortality, something he’s never had to do before. Setting up the scenario where Wolverine could actually die, even if we never believe it will actually happen, is a fun and welcome change from previous installments where he is absolutely indestructible and his only weakness is his super grumpiness. Needless to say, the conspiracy is unveiled and Logan must once again find the inner Wolverine in him to save the day and rescue the girl.

Jackman slips into the role easily, and even though this character is far removed from the comic book Wolverine, he has made the movie Wolverine so much his own that it’s hard to complain about it. I don’t think we needed the forced love story between him and Mariko (Tao Okamoto), mostly because Jackman is finally starting to age and the romance comes off a tad creepy, though it doesn’t make a ton of sense from a script standpoint either. For the most part, the rest of the cast are solid in their roles as well. Okamoto brings a stoic vulnerability, while Rila Fukushima gets the most fun role as the bad-ass sidekick Yukio. Svetlana Khodchenkova as Viper, though, was not very good. Her villain belonged in another movie, not this one. She was hamming it up a bit too much when everybody else in the movie is more or less playing it straight. This made it a bit distracting whenever she was on screen.

It’s hard to say that this is a small scale movie when the fate of Asia’s largest corporation is at stake, and there is a post credits scene teasing Days of the Future Past, which appears to be insanely grandiose in its scope, but The Wolverine feels very self-contained and not interested in the fate of mutants as a whole. This is quite refreshing and whereas I was skeptical of James Mangold directing (I absolutely hated Walk the Line), he shows skill at keeping the story in focus and creating exciting, and actually believable in their own way, action scenes. Here’s hoping that, going forward, superhero movies understand that the story is more important than the explosions. There were only three mutants in this movie, and I never felt wanting for more.