This was kinda the definition of so okay it's average. Not particularly bad at any point, but not particularly great either. It passed an evening acceptably, but beyond a few interesting lead-ins to Days of Future Past

Spoiler

I'll be interested to see what if anything happens now he has his bone claws again

, it's hardly essential viewing.

 

Saw it, don't regret it but wouldn't recommend seeing it in theatres either. It's a good time waster, but certainly nothing special. Probably rent it if you haven't seen it already. 5 or 6/10 seems about right.

 

I saw it yesterday and liked it. So there's that. The post-credits scene is promising.

 

It's entertaining enough. Nothing about it screams watch it now and I don't think watching it in theaters is absolutely necessary. At least it's no Man of Steel.

I am, however, a bit more excited for DoFP now though. Especially after Comic-Con. A lot of these Marvel (Studios) fanboys absolutely despise Singer for trivial reasons, but he has only made good X-Men movies so far. I'm just a bit miffed about the lack of Cycops but the magical resurrection of Xavier after X3.

 

I thought it was mediocre and not as good as either origins or first class. Where are the mutants in a mutant movie? The two mutants, other than Wolverine, were either underutilized or a hacked villain from another superhero franchise. The Silver Samurai was not introduced or built or executed in a way that made it matter.

Where were the damn mutants? The train scene might have been interesting if Wolverine was fighting the Yakuza mutants instead of tattooed thugs. After the previous few films is his fighting a bunch of nominally trained humans going to make him seem in any way cooler?

The ingredients were there for an interesting film but the execution sucked. The film was trying to be a combination of super hero film, East Asian martial arts epic, East Asian family tragedy, and a hack of several films (the parallels with Inception, etc.).

The post credits trailer was nothing special and the lack of Cyclops or Gambit in the Days of Future Past casting info is worrying. Bryan Singer made sub par films which turned X-men into Wolverine + accessories with Magneto and Mystique outshining all others. Source material is very loosely interpreted through a Jackman hard-on.

Hoping they reboot the whole franchise with completely different writers\vision. And please let it not the crap that is the Spiderman reboot.

Edit: The girls were hot with the red head being a great character and Mariko was very beautiful and graceful.

 

This is not a lie. A full summary of what you need to know is this, spoiled in case anyone wants to go see it still.

Spoiler

Adamantium can cut Adamantium if heated/vibrated.

Directly connected to that point, Wolverine no longer has Adamantium on his claws, but retains it everywhere else.

There is an army of good guy ninjas that might hypothetically show up at some point if shit ever gets Extra Real.

The Silver Samurai is a power suit approximately the size of the Hulkbuster that is made of Adamantium, and thus, is liable to show up at some point in the future, possibly being driven by a crazy person.

Professor X is back in his old body; that gambit paid off in full.

Magneto has all of his powers back, or at least enough of them that you can't tell the difference.

Logan is stuck with a preppy-goth psychic Japanese schoolgirl with a katana as a butler and life-sherpa. For now, anyway.

Never save a Japanese guy from an atomic bomb. Let them die. No. Seriously.

There are undestroyed samples of Logan's bone marrow floating around somewhere. I'm sure Weapon X and/or Hydra would love go get their hands on it, and might in the future.

There's a shit-ton more Adamantium on earth than we thought. Seriously. The only reason fifteen intergalactic civilizations haven't descended upon our planet like locusts is because they have no idea we're sitting on enough magic space rock to electroplate a small-ish Gundam.

Logan owns a katana now. He doesn't seem to like using it, though. Also, he doesn't speak Japanese like he does in the comics. He hasn't spent time wandering Japan in the past. This was him spending time in Japan.

Logan is now officially over Jean's death. He is no longer hung up about her, and has come to terms with the fact that yes, he killed her, and hes, she needed to die because she was hurting people. That emotional plot point has been resolved. Expect Scott Summers to be a total bitch about this later.

Nonetheless, I actually liked it. It wasn't a movie of deep thought and moral complexity, but then, it didn't have to be. It's a popcorn flick. People who were expecting it to be amazing were, I think, expecting a bit too much of it.

Wolverine is basically in the same tier as Pacific Rim, only remove all of the easter eggs and giant robot inside jokes and references with cameos of things from elsewhere in the X-men universe. And take the special effects budget down by like, 90%.

You don't watch Pacific Rim for the plot. You watch it because giant robots are fighting giant monsters, and that's cool.

You don't watch Wolverine for the plot. You watch it because Wolverine is fighting ninjas and Yakuza assassins.

My only serious complaint for the movie is that they did spend palpably too much time talking, when this clearly wasn't a talking movie. There needed to be less exposition, and more Kung-Fu Hustle. The best parts were the very end sequence where he shows up in the snow village, and the part between the beginning and the middle where they're running through Tokyo fending off assassins.

I for one like what they did with the Silver Samurai.

Spoiler

Motherfucker is made of Adamantium, and Logan didn't destroy it in any way that would prevent it from being put back together. They just left it lying there in the snow. Considering the Samurai is several BILLION dollars in Adamantium alone, I'm pretty sure somebody, somewhere, picked it up. We'll be seeing the Samurai again, possibly porting him sideways into Iron Man and the Avengers realm of badness by someone incorporating Stark tech or Stark-like tech into it (because the Samurai, while made of MOTHERFUCKING ADAMANTIUM DID I MENTION THAT, was actually pretty clunky by Marvel power armor standards, and could probably use a serious upgrade. Maybe they sank most of their budget into the Adamantium, I don't know. It just feels like Tony's prototype armor from the cave might have been able to take it in a fight if it hadn't been plated in Adamantium. I guess we can't all be Tony Stark).

I was a little disappointed as well that there was no scene where they were speaking Japanese in front of Logan, and expecting him not to understand it, but he did because he's been around that much. It's definitely something that would have happened in the comics, but it wasn't a thing here. In fact, there was a point where Logan came pretty goddamn close to a Samual Jackson rendition of ENGLISH, DO YOU SPEAK IT, which was pretty funny.

Some say there weren't enough mutants, but I thought there were enough. You don't really need that many. This isn't really an X-Man movie, so we don't need shit-tons of mutants and mutant rights issues being smeared everywhere, because that's not really Logan's thing. Logan's stories have always lived in this weird limbo realm that's got half a foot in the world of people like Deadpool and Cable (mercenary underworld), half a foot in the world of Captain America runs (government conspiracies with Hydra and Weapon X), half a foot in the world of the X-Men (mutants 'n stuff), and the last quarter in the general vague direction of the Avengers (Marvel world at large, bigger threats looming on the horizon, saving the world, ect).

In that regard, I feel they nailed it. It was underworld-ish (ninjas, Yakuza), a little Captain America (crazy weapon programs, government conspiracies with megacorps), a little X-Men (EAT IT SNAKE BITCH, plus the stinger), and a little Avengers (the Samurai isn't gone. Also, the stinger again).

So I have no qualms about that at all. The setting is pretty much exactly what it needs to be. They just needed to have a little more action and a little less talking, and it would have been a perfect popcorn flick. As it stands, it's merely a pretty good one.

You can grab it in theaters, but it's not a necessity like Pacific Rim or anything. Rental works just as fine. It's solid. Not perfect, but solid. I would hope they could bump the quality up just a bit more in future Marvel spinoff movies, because it's just a notch and a half or so below where I think the standard needs to be.

It's fine for a Wolverine movie to be a bit flawed, but I don't want major fuckups when we start walking the Phase 2 of the Marvel movie stuff. I'll be pissed if the Doctor Strange and Iron Fist movies are shitty. We need to be at least to the level of "no major complaints" across the board, here.

 

Spoiler

Not going to happen, at least as regards to the Stark connection. The X-Men movies aren't connected to the MCU. As far as I know the only mutants Marvel has access to are Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, and I guess that's because they're considered more tied into the Avengers than the X-Men franchise. Even then they're apparently not allowed to reference them as mutants at all.