The Wolverine (2013)

"Hey bub, don't forget about me!  I'm still here!" - Not actually said by Wolverine.  Oh sorry, it's The Wolverine now.

I kind of feel bad for old Logan.  A few years ago he was at the top of the food chain as far as superheroes go, but then Fox decided to piss all over the comics and nearly destroy the franchise.  He's had to resort to uncredited cameos and sneaking a movie in at the end of July.  Despite all the trailers and commercials, a good number of my friends weren't even aware there was a new Wolverine movie coming out.  Judging by the lack of attendance at the theater, I'm guessing that the public at large was either unaware or staying away.  It's a shame because The Wolverine is actually a decent movie.  It's certainly a step up from either X-Men: The Last Stand or X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  That's not saying that much though.  You should have filmed Hugh Jackman pooping on the street, and that would have made for a better film than either The Last Stand or Origins.

I wish I would have
saved this issue.

I was a little hesitant to see this one myself due to all the delays and different directors attached at various points.  It was a few years ago when I last saw Darren Aronofsky doing interviews about it before dropping out.  The most encouraging news I'd heard was that The Wolverine was going to be based on the Chris Claremont Wolverine limited series from the 80's when Logan was in Japan.  That was the definitive Wolverine series when I was a kid.  That's when he became cool to me and my friends.  In fact, that series is what got me into reading comics and into the X-Men in the first place.  We'd trade those around and read them over and over.  The irony is that I barely remember anything about it.  I can say that while The Wolverine does focus on his time in Japan, I'd say it's pretty loosely based on that series.  Some liberties were taken, but that's fine with me though.  It's nothing like the liberties taken in the latter half of Origins.

Taking place sometime after the events of The Last Stand, Logan (Hugh Jackman) is living isolated in a cave up north.  Haunted by visions and dreams of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), he's having difficulty getting past things he's done.  I was having issues with this, too.  I thought we had all agreed that The Last Stand never happened.  I liked that The Wolverine began with him dealing with his internal conflict, I just wish the previous films allowed for a better starting point.  I don't like that the X-Men's movie-universe has already killed off a character like Jean Grey.

Logan heads into town to confront some hunters for poisoning a bear, but before things escalate Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a mysterious swordsman, intervenes and asks Logan to accompany her to Japan to meet her boss.  She reveals that her employer is Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi), the head of a large technology company.  Logan saved a young Yashida back in WWII when the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki (which we see in a cool flashback).  Yashida is extremely sick and wishes to repay his debt to Logan before dying.  What he proposes is to take Logan's healing factor and transfer it to him, giving Yashida immortality and allowing Logan the opportunity at a normal life.  Logan actually refuses this, and Yashida dies that night.  As this happens, Yashida's "oncologist" (Svetlana Khodchenkova) infects Logan with something.

Later at Yashida's funeral, the Yakuza attack and attempt to kidnap Yashida's granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto).  During the escape, Logan is injured and finds he's not healing like normal.  Whatever that oncologist did to him has affected his healing factor.  Mariko and Logan go into hiding together while they try to figure out who's after her and why.

About halfway through The Wolverine it dawned on me that I wasn't watching a superhero movie anymore.  While the setting gives this more of a general martial arts feel, it's more about Logan continuing to struggle with his past and trying to move on.  After the first 30 minutes, there's not a lot of action either, yet I found myself more engaged despite this.  It's much more interesting to watch Logan deal with his failing powers and internal conflict while still trying to protect Mariko.  The fact that he's no longer invincible makes him more human and compelling.  It's also way more satisfying when things eventually turn back to his favor.  Director James Mangold did his best work with these character moments.

The real weakness to The Wolverine is that the plot itself isn't all that developed.  When we find out what these people want with Mariko, it's not all that convincing or even very interesting.  Many of the characters appear to be playing both sides or have unclear goals, but since we don't know much about them it's difficult to understand why or care.  Mark Bomback and Scott Frank's screenplay needed some punch up and fine tuning.  It's frustrating because just a few tweaks here and there could have put this over the top.

There are some great action scenes though.  The highlight is one that takes place on the top of a speeding bullet train.  I was a little worried about the look of it based on the trailer, but it really stands out as the best in the film.  The action scene prior to this could have also been a great scene, but it suffers from bad editing and too much shaky cam work.  It's getting really frustrating that action films continue to employ this when I don't know anyone that likes it.  A later fight scene has too many cutaways and would have been better served to have some wider and static shots.  Part of the issue is that they were going for a PG-13 rating, so they had to avoid showing all the stabbing and excess blood.  It isn't bloodless, but I wouldn't call it bloody.  You do see a few scenes of swords going through people, but it felt like cartoon violence.  Also, you may struggle a few times wondering how a sword or knife is impaling parts of the anatomy where Wolverine's unbreakable adamantium skeleton should have prevented it from happening.

Despite all this, it's not until the very end when it finally succumbs to dumb, comic book movie action, where you've got lots of CG and improbable physics.  Additionally, a friend of mine who knows his metal, pointed out a bunch of inconsistencies regarding the general physical properties of metal during the climax.  It's not enough to ruin the film, but it's hard to ignore when you think about it.  The special effects overall are good though and definitely an improvement over Origins.  I saw this in 3D as I didn't have a choice.  It didn't ruin the film, but didn't add anything to it either.

A few words about Hugh Jackman before finishing up.  I love how seriously he takes this character, but still seems to have fun with it.  I also really respect how seriously he takes getting in shape for the role.  He's in another league as far as preparing yourself physically for a role.  I've seen other actors turn their backs on superhero roles, or not dedicate themselves to the physical demands, but Jackman understands what Wolverine has done for him.  It's hard not to appreciate that he still cares after all these years.

Oh, one last thing.  There's a great post-credit scene that totally made me geek out.  I was already looking forward to X-Men: Days of Future Past, but now I'm really looking forward to it.  There's nothing at the very end though, so you don't have to sit through all of the credits.

The Wolverine is a comic book film that tries its hardest to not be one, but ultimately still suffers from some of their faults.  The dialog and story are little muddled, and it has some bad camera work coupled with a typical big, dumb action climax. Where it works is when it gives us a little more depth into Wolverine as a character.  It's definitely a big step up from X-Men Origins: Wolverine and I think fans of the series will ultimately enjoy it.  Worth a matinee.

3.5 (out of 5) Death Stars

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) - Movie Review

If only the Will Ferrell connection could have morphed this into Hansel & Gretel: Bitch Hunter, then we really would have been onto something.

I'm referring to the 30 Rock "Bitch Hunter" joke, which featured Will Ferrell.  If you're wondering where the hell I'm going with this, I was surprised to see in the opening credits that Will Ferrell and Adam McKay co-produced Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. This immediately perked me up, thinking their involvement signaled that maybe I was in for a treat.  You see the names McKay and Ferrell on a movie and you think comedy, right?  Unfortunately, that's not what we got here.

The good thing I'll say for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is that is doesn't waste much time (it's not even 90 minutes) or have a particularly complex plot.  After a brief prologue that's basically a recap of the original folk tale, we fast forward several years later, and Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) are all grown up.  The siblings have become a well known duo of witch hunters, who are hired by the mayor of a small town to investigate the kidnapping of several of the town's children by witches. Eventually they cross paths with the dark witch Muriel (Famke Janssen), who need the children to complete a ritual involving the upcoming Blood Moon.  The ritual will give the witches immunity to fire, which is still the best way to kill a witch, so Hansel and Gretel can't let this happen.

Despite being famous for witch hunting and supposedly having a lot of experience, Hansel and Gretel seem pretty bad at it throughout the film.  They setup traps that are easily gotten out of, don't fare very well in hand-to-hand combat, and haven't learned that you should lead a target when shooting at something that's moving.  Seriously, you see that happen at least three times in the movie.  Awareness of their location wasn't a strength of theirs either, as they are surprised to find the town they are investigating is a stone's throw from the house they grew up in.  Their lack of skill is made up for by having a modern-day arsenal of high powered weapons at their disposal.  This was another thing that kind of distracted me at first, but then I wrote it off as a stylistic choice.  I had to remind myself that these stories are fantasies, so if they want to put their own spin on it and add to the mythology, then go for it.  It's more forgivable than something like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which tries to add mythology and fantasy around real events and people.

The main problem with H&S:WH is that it's pretty clear they couldn't decide what kind of film they were trying to make. It was originally scheduled to be released in March of 2012, so when you see an almost year long delay, you think reshoots and lots of edits trying to find something that worked.  Opens with more of a horror feel, but there's never a scary moment in the film. Then, one of the first lines of dialog Gretel has she drops the 'F bomb', and it totally took me out of the film.  It made me think of Your Highness, which had a lot of profanity for no good reason other than to be vulgar to get a cheap laugh. There's even a nude scene that felt out of place.  Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with swearing or nudity, but if they don't add anything to the film, then it's kind of pointless.  It's simply not in the same league as more recent horror-comedies like Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Zombieland or Cabin in the Woods.

It's also much gorier than I expected.  Again, it didn't seem they quite knew how they should use the gore though.  There's a great scene involving a troll that looked like Tito Ortiz (seriously though it was Derek Mears in a troll suit), but it's over in a flash and the movie doesn't surprise you like that again.  There's a mix of practical effects and CG effects, but you don't need to have a trained eye to tell the difference and know that the practical stuff worked better.  I didn't bother with seeing this in 3D, and while it was shot in 3D (and also available in IMAX), I didn't see anything about the visuals that 3D would have improved.

Poor Jeremy Renner.  After The Hurt Locker and then The Town, he seemed poised for super stardom, but then he ended up playing the least interesting superhero in The Avengers (something even he's expressed irritation over), a lackluster Bourne movie, and now this.  It's the same with Gemma Arterton.  I thought she'd be a bigger deal by now, but it just hasn't gone that way yet.  I really hope they are able to find some films that match the level of their talent.  I felt like both of them were trying here, and at times I thought they had good chemistry together, but the material really let them down.

It has a decent supporting cast that's also wasted.  Famke Janssen spends the majority of the film in unrecognizable makeup, and there's not much memorable about the role otherwise.  Peter Stormare is the town sheriff, and plays a weak bad guy that was simply a lazy character stereotype.  Thomas Mann has a small role as a huge fan/groupie of Hansel and Gretel, but while you can tell the character was meant to be comic relief, it just wasn't written that way.

Director Tommy Wirkola, who co-wrote this with Dante Harper, showed a lot of promise back in 2008 with Dead Snow.  Instead of building on that, he took a step back here with an unfunny script, and a story that's all over the place.  The thing that really made me notice this the most was that they introduce the fact that Hansel needs to take a shot every few hours or otherwise he spazzes out.  You think it might be some cool thing about how he's suppressing some witch disease or something like that, but then he says it's because he ate too much candy as a kid and now has a sugar disease.  Diabetes?  Really?  Why was this in the film?  To increase awareness of diabetes, but then never call it diabetes?  I'm surprised they didn't have a scene of Gretel massaging her breast and complaining about a lump.  Anyway, I think they should have totally gone wild with the gore, and then got someone to punch up the script.  The movie is treated way too seriously, and it should have gone for camp.  That's why I was so surprised to see Adam McKay and Will Ferrell as co-producers.  I figured they would have noticed that the film needed a lot more humor, and either added it themselves or brought in another writer to do so.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is an inconsistent mixed bag that never figures out what kind of movie it wants to be.  It wastes the few good things it had going for it with flat dialog that desperately needed a huge infusion of humor.  I really wanted to have more fun with the film than I did.  I can only recommend this as a rental.

2 (out of 5) Death Stars

Taken 2 (2012) - Movie Review

Maybe Liam Neeson should stay home for a while...

Seriously he shouldn't go anywhere.  He either gets in a plane crash or someone gets kidnapped.

Spoilers ahead...

It's been a year since the events of Taken and things seems to be looking up for Bryan Mills.  He has a much better relationship with his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), and things are going well with his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace).  In the past he'd be gone after a few weeks, but is now present in their lives, even taking time to teach Kim how to drive.  Why a college student living in LA doesn't know how to drive yet I'll never understand.

Anyway, there's not much to the plot.  You learn that the father of Kim's kidnapper from the first film wants revenge. He then attempts to kidnap the Mills family while they are vacationing in Istanbul.  Mills fights back.  That's it.  That's the entire plot.  There aren't any surprises here and it's pretty predictable.

What made Taken so much fun was that it really caught everyone by surprise.  Nobody was expecting much from it, but it was tension filled and had all these great moments of impact.  They captured lightning in a bottle, and ended up with a hit.  Naturally, a sequel was coming, but unfortunately, Taken 2 is a step back in quality.  There's so many silly and convenient things done with the plot that it feels amateurish at times.  Here's a few examples:

• Early in the film, Kim steals some clothes from a random locker, and they appeared to be men's clothing, but they happen to fit her perfectly.
• Mills has Kim throw several grenades around the city and nobody ever seems to mind or notice.
• Naturally, Kim is forced to drive in a high speed chase, and is suddenly now an expert driver, even though she failed her previous drivers test.  Quick learning curve, eh?  
• During this scene Mills basically says to Kim that since she can't shoot a gun, then she needs to drive.  This made me wonder that considering Mills 'particular set of skills', and what happened to his daughter in the previous film, how come he hasn't bothered teaching her self defense or how to use a gun?  Wouldn't that be something a person like Mills would be concerned with in case someone attempted to kidnap her again?
• Midway through the film, Mills and Kim crash through the US embassy, and their car gets all shot up in the process.  You see soldiers converging on the car, yet in the very next scene Mills is walking around town again hot on the heels of the kidnappers without any explanation of how he got out of the embassy.  It seems like a really important step was skipped there.
• The first time Mills escapes from the kidnappers, he leaves his ex-wife behind without having her hide or securing her somewhere, allowing her to immediately be kidnapped again.

The bad guys were pretty stupid, too.  It was like how when a Bond villain tells him his entire plan, but then leaves the room allowing him plenty of time to escape.  What's the deal with the main bad guy (Rade Serbedzija) anyway?.  His son kidnaps Mills' daughter, among many others, Mills gets his daughter back killing the son in the process, but the father thinks he's the one that needs revenge.  Seems like you're pretty much in the even column at this point.  Mills even get the opportunity to explain this to the guy, and he just didn't care.  He was about as cookie cutter and single minded as a villain can get.

Yeah, I get it.  Taken 2 isn't a movie meant to be steeped in realism or worrying about things like logic.

There's some really awful dialog, and it's not just with the bad guys.  I even thought some of the dialog between Mills and Kim was very uncomfortable.  He's asking her things like if she loves her boyfriend, and if she's ever been in love before.  That just seemed weird to me.  The script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen badly needed some punch up.  There were many missed opportunities to inject some humor or one liners that would have put some fun in the film.

Taken 2 was directed by Luc Besson's current go-to guy, Olivier Megaton (Transporter 3, Columbiana), which is a great name for an action director.  Megaton does a good job with keeping the pace of the film tight, and it doesn't really suffer from any slow down in the action, but it's just too one-dimensional.  That's as much to blame on Besson and Kamen though.  It also has a pretty unsatisfying ending.  

The action isn't bad, but it's still a step back from the first film.  In early fight, it was nearly impossible to tell what was going on due to all the quick cuts and rapid moving camera work.  The only time you seemed to get a real good shot of the hand-to-hand action was towards the end when he fights a guy in a track suit that's roughly the same age as Liam Neeson.  He also seems to kill several guys in the movie without really doing much to the guy other than hitting them, which I thought only Chuck Norris could do.  Neeson was at his best once he had a gun.

Liam Neeson wasn't bad, but he can play this role in his sleep.  He didn't seem as invested this time around.  There's one cool thing that they did where they show you a little insight into the thought process once he's kidnapped, and you see how he's taking in details, so he knows where and what the situation is, but it gets abandoned shortly after.  Maggie Grace got a little more to do this time around and actually got to take part in the action and rescuing.  I do think it's kind of funny that she's almost 30 and still passing for much younger.  I think we'd all like to know her anti-aging secrets.  I love Famke Janssen, but it only seemed like she was in the movie only to be consistent with the first film.  Her role this time around consisted of either crying, or waking up from being unconscious.  It's not her fault, the script just didn't give her much to do.

I didn't hate Taken 2, and it's not the worst thing I've ever seen, but it's another case of sequelitis striking again.  It's just more of the same, except it's missing the tension and thrills of the first film. This felt like they were making it up as they went along, and it's about as lazy as a sequel gets.  I can't recommend this as anything more than a rental.  You'd be better off just watching the first Taken again this weekend on DVD and save yourself some money.

2.5 (out of 5) Death Stars.