‘The Wolverine’ at 10: A Rare Example Of A Superhero Movie That Skillfully Avoids Marinating in Pure White-Guy Angst

When set pictures of Hugh Jackman reprising the role of Wolverine in the upcoming Deadpool 3 surfaced online recently, most reactions seemed to fall in one of two camps: Fans beside themselves with excitement that Jackman’s fast-healing, metal-clawed Wolverine would be sporting a more comics-accurate yellow-and-blue costume; and fans disappointed to see that the character’s end, depicted with such poignance in James Mangold’s 2017 movie Logan, would be (in some fashion, whether timeline-jumping or multiversing) undone for the sake of bantering with Ryan Reynolds. Logan may also have come to mind for some viewers watching Mangold’s newest film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, perhaps musing that the new film isn’t as satisfying as the writer-director’s previous foray into sending off a long-running pulp hero embodied by a charismatic movie star. 

The fanboy-and-critic consensus about Logan is correct; it is an unusually moving and tough-minded superhero movie, unafraid to confront a sense of regret and mortality that most comics adaptations are happy to snap away at will. It’s a shame, though, that appreciation for Logan has seemingly come at the expense of the other James Mangold-directed, Hugh Jackman-starring Wolverine movie, one that feels like it’s faded into the background in the decade since it was initially released back in July of 2013: The Wolverine. In some ways, the poorly regarded X-Men Origins: Wolverine is still better-remembered; it was a bigger hit back in 2009, and it does feature the first appearance of Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, albeit in a bastardized form by the time the movie gets to its hideous CG-slathered finale. But the past ten years’ worth of additional superhero movies, legacy sequels, and forever franchises have only strengthened my conviction that The Wolverine is one of the best of its kind. 

One of the movie’s great strengths is its confidence to not fixate on either beginning or ending something. This might sound counterintuitive; part of the frustration of watching an extended-universe movie is that sense of ceaseless, self-perpetuating middle. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Too many superhero sagas treat their middle-era stories, either sequelizing their origins or rushing to sweep the heroes’ stories up into some greater struggle, sometimes in opposition to their individual character development. Occasionally you get something as good as Captain America: The Winter Soldier; more often you get something as overstuffed and baldly transitional as Captain America: Civil War.

The Wolverine is like The Winter Soldier with an even tighter focus on its lead hero; none of its characters play a major role in future X-Men movies, and the one who pops up again just winds up reconceived and recast anyway. That said, the movie is very much in-continuity with its predecessors; it opens with Logan having exiled himself to the wilderness, living with the guilt of having saved the world by killing a possessed Jean Grey at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand, a notably terrible movie. In a lot of ways, The Wolverine is an odd story out, a postscript on the first three X-Men movies before their timeline was futzed with by the events of Days of Future Past, which came out the following year. That one-off nature, combined with the already-wonky X-Men continuity, gives the story unusual leeway; it may be the least saga-fied movie in the whole X-Men series. 

In a loose adaptation of a famous comics storyline, Wolverine is summoned to Japan by an old sort-of friend: a Japanese soldier who Logan happened to protect from an A-bomb blast toward the end of World War II, when he was a POW outside Nagasaki. The opening sequence establishing this relationship crackles with pulpy alternate history that may have tipped Mangold as a good candidate for Indiana Jones. It’s the kind of half-solemn, half-ridiculous historical entanglement that makes the X-Men movies both more playful and more grounded than the MCU’s closed-circuit soap opera. It’s also a starting place for a story that zooms in, rather than out. Mangold is also one of the few directors to make evocative use of the Fox Forest – the Canadian wilderness where Fox seemed fixated on sending its superheroes, presumably for cost-cutting reasons, for much of the 2000s and 2010s. This is where we catch up with Wolverine, having grown the perfect sequel-ready big bushy beard, sleeping in the woods, and conveying a feeling of mutual respect with a bear. This is a solo movie that feels genuinely (yet still entertainingly) lonely.

Once Wolverine reaches Japan, the movie mixes crime-movie intrigue (OK, maybe sometimes crime-movie boilerplate) with comic-book action (especially, though not limited to, the extended version released on Blu-ray, which adds a substantial 10 minutes of footage) as he attempts to protect Mariko (Tao Okamoto), the soldier’s granddaughter. The movie’s setting also keeps Logan from marinating in pure white-guy angst; it’s the rare superhero movie where the cast isn’t even close to majority white men. Logan’s de facto sidekick, for example, is Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a sword-wielding bodyguard with the powers of both precognition and impeccable fashion sense—exactly the kind of deep-cut comics character that can get plentiful screen time in a less epic adventure.

Mangold excels in the area of “less epic,” which sounds like a backhanded compliment until you’re watching a bunch of ninjas shooting arrows at Wolverine from snowy rooftops. In Dial of Destiny, the director may have been put in the unenviable position of attempting to imitate the mastery of Steven Spielberg set pieces, but his action sequences in The Wolverine are perfectly scaled: a Yakuza-instigated melee at a funeral, a delightful face-off atop a bullet train (knocked off in both Dial of Destiny and this summer’s latest Mission: Impossible installment), and that snowy ninja attack, among others. (There’s a deleted sequence restored in the unrated cut that’s more fun than about three-quarters of the superhero action sequences that have arrived since then.) Ross Emery makes great use of shadows and pops of color (like Yukio’s blood-red hair); The Wolverine actually looks like a real movie, rather than a composite of Zoom calls and FX demos. In the funeral fight, Emery and Mangold use close-ups and shallow focus to enhance the movie’s connection to Wolverine’s point of view–not always an easy task for a superpowered character.

Granted, it’s a little easier when Wolverine’s mutant healing factor is greatly reduced; early in the movie, he’s offered the chance to be relieved of his sometimes-torturous power that allows him to live for potential centuries (he mulls it over, turns it down, and then it happens anyway). The powered-down superhero is a trope so common that it’s a part of a full two-thirds of the Wolverine solo movies; Logan does nearly the same thing, just like Superman II and Spider-Man 2 and Iron Man 3, among others. But it’s particularly potent for the film version of Wolverine because Jackman has been grimly enduring some manner of pain since his introduction as the character: Early in the first movie, someone asks if it hurts when his metal claws pop through his knuckles. “Every time,” he says quietly—and Jackman has enough no-nonsense charisma to stave off the potential self-pity. Watching him get knocked around and bloodied up throughout The Wolverine feels like a natural extension of that scene. (It also confirms Jackman’s kinship with Harrison Ford, another sometimes-gruff movie star who can be alternately funny and emotionally vulnerable when taking a punch.)

The Wolverine confirms Hugh Jackman’s kinship with Harrison Ford, another sometimes-gruff movie star who can be alternately funny and emotionally vulnerable when taking a punch.

It’s a little disconcerting how the movie treats Logan’s pining for Jean Grey as a defining romantic tragedy, given how little time the two characters actually spend together in the movies before her demise. But even this dramatic fudge, a major problem with The Last Stand, kind of works here, because Wolverine is fixating on the kind of connection he might have forged in a more normal, traditionally mortal life. Logan imagines a rough endpoint for a man who has been doing the superhero job for over a century, long after a normal life has eluded him. The Wolverine isn’t quite so elegiac; it’s not designed to be. Yet there is some dramatic heft in seeing Logan reacclimate to that superpowered life, even (or especially) if that means embracing his darker tendencies. The movie’s attitude toward violence—that it is to be undertaken with great reluctance, and is also very, very cool to behold—is not especially nuanced. Its treatment of Wolverine as a character, however, is top-notch: In Jackman and Mangold’s adaptation, he’s an instrument of violence attempting to keep his distance while inevitably drawn back into humanity’s petty conflicts, then doing his best to point his claws in the right direction. Too bad that in the ten years since The Wolverine, more superhero movies haven’t emerged with such clarity of vision and characterization. It’s hard to lose vast sums of money on a movie as stripped-down and satisfying as The Wolverine.

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned