The Wolverine

 
Art & Culture

You have to feel a bit sorry for Hugh Jackman. 14 years after he made the hop from Oz to Hollywood, he’s appeared in a lot of films, none of them successful, except for X Men and its spin offs, and Les Miserables.  Slash or sing.

Mind you, for a man of 45, he’s in good shape, though perhaps with some CGI help. Given that he has to spend most of this film with is top off, I suppose it makes sense to give him a 12 pack. It’s just a pity they couldn’t give him a halfway decent script to go with it.

Although there is a lot of coming and going and to-ing and fro-ing, this is at heart an action movie, which involves an almost endless number of fight sequences, interspersed with chase sequences.It’s all set in Japan, for reasons which are not quite clear, but then neither is the plot. Someone is trying to kill someone else to try and get hold of something they want, but someone else tries to stop them. Or something. It hardly matters.

So why do I feel sorry for Hugh? Well, he’s tried a number of different film genres – mainly romcoms – and they’ve all been flops. But there have been seven X Men movies and derivatives (including the one about to arrive next), and this cannot be what he came into the world of cinema to do. Given that there’s unlikely to be a sequel to Les Miserables (praise the lord), then it looks as though he’s stuck playing the man with bad hair and nails that need cutting well past retirement date.

It’s enough to make you want to give up immortality.

4/10

Phil Raby

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