I won’t lie, I’ve been looking forward to finally seeing the trailer for ‘The Wolverine’ for quite some time now. The wait is over, we finally got to see a glimpse of what we’re in store for this summer. As you may know I loathed X-men Origins: Wolverine with a passion. I still have a hard time pumping myself up for any Hugh Jackman Wolverine stuff after enduring that giant heaping turd of a film. However I’m a fair guy and give things more than their fair share of chances, though I’ve said here before that I’d actually love a Wolverine reboot with a whole new cast. Still I am reaching deep down within my soul and looking past the last couple Wolverine based flicks and again giving Hugh one LAST chance to redeem himself as everyone’s favorite berserker. So I watched the trailer several times now and to me this looks like a pretty solid attempt at a ‘decent” Wolverine adventure.
Did it wow me like I was hoping? No. Did it suck as bad as I was expecting? Not at all. I give this teaser a solid B. This meaning that it could go one of two ways. Way down or way up on the scale of what us true Wolverine fans have really always wanted. First I gotta say Jackman looks good as he always has in the role, he’s a great actor and fully capable of bringing us the best Wolverine performance we’re likely to ever see on screen. I can be knit picky about wanting Wolverine’s crazy comic book hair all day, but hey this is Hollywood and they want to make Wolverine super sexy, not a freaky, hairy little five foot tall mutant with fucked up hair. I get it. I let go of ever seeing that version of the character on screen.
So with this trailer we see Logan apparently heading back to Japan to become “mortal” because he’s tired of living forever with all the pain he’s endured in his life. It appears Lord Shingen weakens his healing factor much like in the original Claremont/Miller limited series from 1982 which this movie is loosely based on. However in that story he heads to Japan to find his fiancee has been forced into marriage by her father Lord Shingen, to an abusive Yakuza crimeboss. Hence Wolverine goes batshit crazy against a clan of ninjas ect.
This movie version looks like it’s trying to head into a “more epic” storyline, amping up the special effects and including a bunch of villains into the mix. This to me could be the first sign of a mistake in the movie. Trying to cram too much into a perfectly human story of love and revenge. However it’s really too soon to jump to any conclusions. One thing that appears to be missing is the blood and violence needed to properly tell the store of a man with razor sharp blades indestructibly bound to his knuckles. This movie better not skimp on the blood. I want to see Wolverine’s claws slice and dice like they do in the comic, in all of the past films we never see any blood, severed arms, legs, ect. I know this is a PG-13 movie but at least give us a little in the way of what sort of damage this mutant would do in a real world with weapons like that. Again, too soon to tell, this movie could indeed give us all that and more. I just can’t take another bloodless kiddie Wolverine flick. So all that said I wasn’t blown away by the trailer. It has potential, unfortunately we don’t yet know if it will finally raise the bar to the true potential of what an amazing Wolverine flick can and should be….what do you think?
