Movie Review: The Wolverine

Remember X-Men Origins: Wolverine?  Good, because neither does The Wolverine.

Four years after everyone's favorite adamantium-clawed mutant sputtered a bit (ok, a lot) with his first solo film, Wolverine gets a worthy do-over, courtesy of director James Mangold, a frighteningly intense Hugh Jackman, a talented supporting cast, and with a screenplay by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank.

Welcome back, Wolverine.  We've missed you.

The Wolverine manages to find a nice balance between the Japanese saga told in the 1982 Chris Claremont/Frank Miller comics and the established film universe.  Opening with a flashback of Logan as a POW in a Nagasaki prison camp during World War II, he saves a young soldier named Yashida (Ken Yamamura) from a nuclear blast, suffering and healing from gruesome injuries in the process.  In the present day, Logan is a mess.  Distraught, and haunted by nightmares since having to kill Jean Grey during the events at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand, he's gone all scraggly and has retreated to the mountains of Canada.  He's friends with a bear, but even that ends badly.

But then he's visited by a mysterious woman called Yukio (Rila Fukushima). She's been tasked to bring Wolverine to Japan to visit his old friend Yashida, who became a successful businessman after his life was saved at Nagasaki, but who is now dying of cancer.  Yashida doesn't want to die.  Obsessed with Logan's healing factor, he claims that a way has been found to transfer the mutation to him, which would save his life and release Logan from his own long-suffering, seemingly endless lifespan.

Logan may be depressed, but he's not interested in giving up his healing factor.  Does he lose it anyway?  Yup.  And of course there are more sinister things at work - like Yashida's scheming son Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), who's not happy at all that the family business will be left to his daughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto) instead of him, and there are dealings with the Yakuza and other unsavory characters from the Japanese criminal underworld.  Then there's Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), the scientist who's as venomous as her name.

The trailers we've seen for The Wolverine have been a bit misleading.  Yes, there are some really cool action sequences, like a fight scene on a bullet train, and Wolverine taking on scores of assassins at a funeral.  But there are long stretches of good story in here, and the movie plays less like a traditional superhero movie and more like a crime drama that just happens to have a guy with claws who heals really fast in the middle of everything.

This is definitely Hugh Jackman's best performance as Wolverine since the first two X-Men movies (and even his First Class cameo).  Where in Origins, he seemed far too polite, this Wolverine swears, has no patience for anyone, gets into fights, and he really, really doesn't want to be forced to take a bath.  For the first time, we see what it's like for him to deal with the terrible losses that come with living such a long life.  And after he's deprived of his healing factor, we get to see him deal with a different kind of fear for the first time.

Much credit also has to go to the women in this film, particularly Rila Fukushima and Tao Okamoto, who are both making their film debut.  Fukushima is quite a badass, and a sidekick for Wolverine that I'd love to see in more X-Men films.  Wolverine spends a good part of the film on the run with Okamoto's Mariko, and they not only have great chemistry in their scenes together, which are both touching and at times actually very funny.  Famke Janssen also returns in flashback form as Jean Grey, mainly to torment Wolverine, but it's nice to have her back in this series too.

There's also Svetlana Khodchenkova as Viper, who at times seems the odd one out.  She's the catalyst for a lot of the things that go wrong for Wolverine in the movie, but at times her character seems a bit out of place.  At least, a lot more comic-bookish than any of the other elements of the film, especially in the third act, which has the biggest CGI-action spectacle of the film.  I've heard complaints that the final act goes a bit overboard in that respect, but I enjoyed it, since it had a few surprises that I wasn't expecting (and not the obvious one).

Major props have to go James Mangold, who picked our flailing Wolverine solo film series back up from adamantium bullets and painfully-obvious CGI claws, and gave us just a beautifully-shot Wolverine movie that respects both the comics and the films.  The Wolverine is nastier and darker than what we've seen in the previous X-Men films, it's violent without being gratuitous about it, there's a bit of romance, it's funny as hell, and has characters that we actually care about - particularly Wolverine himself.

I can't end this review without mentioning the infamous end-credits scene.  Yes, it's awesome.  No, I'm not giving away what it is.  Just make sure you don't miss it.  Going by the audience response I saw (and participated in) last night to The Wolverine, and their reaction at seeing what's to come...let's just say next summer...there is an overall sense that the X-Men movies are finally back, and that is an amazing thing.

Film Review: The Trouble With Bliss

 

Essentially, this is another middle-aged-guy-in-a-rut story, but it's not bad.  Based on the novel East 5th Bliss by Douglas Light, Michael C. Hall stars as Morris Bliss, a 35-year-old still living in his childhood bedroom in his father's apartment on New York's Lower East Side.  The centerpiece of his bedroom is a map covered with pushpins of all the cities of the world he wants to visit but will likely never travel to.  He has no job, he's entirely dependent on his father (Peter Fonda) - who he still refers to as "Daddy" - and doesn't seem of have a single aspiration to be anything but the loser he appears to be.  Even the 18-year-old high schooler he's dating (Brie Larson) wasn't by his own doing - she was the one who picked him up.

However, it's the midlife crisises of everyone around him:  the best friend (Chris Messina) who's always inventing stories about being involved with international drug cartels, the sexually frustrated neighbor (Lucy Liu), the loser high school buddy (Brad William Henke) wanting to re-live their adolescent troublemaking glory who also happens to be the father of Morris' teenage girlfriend, that ultimately teach him how to break out of his perpetual rut and finally grow up. 

I'm not sure how much you're supposed to like the other characters. The girlfriend was a brat (and, well, a teenager), the neighbor was clearly using him, the high school buddies were losers. There's also a strange subplot about a woman moonlighting as a homeless squatter that didn't quite feel like it belonged with the rest of the story.  The combination of all of them left Morris surrounded by people who were more lost than he was and he was just finally realizing it. 

Directed by Michael Knowles, The Trouble With Bliss doesn't really tread new ground storywise, but the performances were decent enough, particularly Hall's, especially as he starts becoming a participant in the world he's living in.  His reaction just to seeing a local supermarket he'd never been to before was hilarious.  Larson's teenage girlfriend has a few good moments as well, although the movie seems to go out of it's way to remind the audience that she is 18 and that their relationship isn't as creepy as it sounds.

At its heart, the film is simply about a guy trying to get his act together, and it mostly works, even if it's a story we've heard before.  Again, it's really worth it for Michael C. Hall's performance.

The Trouble With Bliss opens in New York and On Demand on March 23, and additional cities nationwide starting March 30.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Full disclosure:  I love the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  The first movie was a pleasant surprise and probably one of my favorite action/adventure movies of the last decade.  I enjoyed the two sequels even though they were admittedly a bloated, convoluted mess.  What can I say?  The action scenes are always a blast, At Worlds End had what was probably my favorite movie wedding of all time, and Johnny Depp's Captain Jack always cracks me up.  They're just fun.  I even have the Pirates mouse ears from Disney World.  So I love the Pirates franchise, and I make no apologies for it.

Now I wasn't sure we needed a fourth movie, but at the conclusion of the last film I was hoping we'd get a Jack/Barbossa film without all the other nonsense bogging down the proceedings like the previous two sequels had.  With On Stranger Tides, we kinda got that, and it was surprisingly good -  it's much better than the dreadful reviews I'd heard about going in. 

As promised in the final scenes of At Worlds End, the new Pirates adventure is about the search for the Fountain of Youth.  Captain Jack, still without a ship or a crew, is ordered by the King of England to help Captain Barbossa (now a peg-legged royal after mysteriously losing the Black Pearl) find the Fountain before the Spaniards do.  Of course, Jack quickly escapes, but he just as quickly ends up in the clutches of the evil Blackbeard (Ian McShane) and his daughter Angelica (Penelope Cruz), who are also searching for the Fountain on their zombie-infested ship.  Making matters worse for Jack, it turns out Angelica is one of his spurned past-loves, and needless to say, she's not happy with him.

Wow.  I actually managed to explain the plot of a Pirates movie in one paragraph.  There's an improvement to the series right there.

For the most part, this new and improved Pirates works.  The story was fairly simple to understand, and while new director Rob Marshall's action sequences didn't quite have the epic scale of Gore Verbinski's films, they were still pretty damn good.  It had lots and lots of sword fights, which I loved.

I did see it in 3D.  You don't need to.  Outside of some swords coming right at you in a few shots, you don't even notice it for the most part.  It wasn't as useless as the 3D in Thor, but disappointing nonetheless.  I love 3D when it's done well, but I can't wait until they stop slapping it on everything.

As far as villians, what On Stranger Tides no longer has in Davy Jones it makes up for in the awesomeness of Ian McShane as Blackbeard, who is as great as he usually is in any role.  Penelope Cruz was also a decent addition as Angelica, who seems just as devious as Jack, which almost makes them a perfect pair.  Geoffrey Rush just seems to love hamming it up as Barbossa - I would have loved to have seen more interaction between him and Jack.

Former Pirates couple Will and Elizabeth are unnoticably absent from the new film, and their replacement couple, missionary Phillip and mermaid Syrena don't add much.  In fact, I can't even figure out what the point of either of those characters were.  But the mermaids themselves are quite cool, and provide one of the best and creepiest sequences in the film.

I did miss a few of the characters from the previous films, such as pirate BFFs Pintel and Ragetti and the two British guard dolts that Jack is always getting into verbal confrontations with.  Maybe they're still with the Black Pearl, which appears to be alive and well?  I hope so.

I would put On Stranger Tides as my second favorite film in the series behind the first film.  It's definitely better than the two sequels, and if left me hoping for the first time that maybe we might get a fifth film.  Looking at the opening weekend numbers, its star might fading a bit in the US, but it's still doing gangbusters overseas...so we may just get one.  And I would be fine with that.

Bridesmaids

If you've ever been a bridesmaid, this movie is simply hiliarious.  Since I've been both a bridesmaid and a maid of honor, I'm still laughing at it.  In fact, I have several bridesmaid veteran friends that I'd love to go back and see this with again.  What's even more impressive about Bridesmaids is that not only did it prove that women are capable of making a successful gross-out comedy, we can do that and include a geniunely sweet story as well.

Bridesmaids stars SNL's Kristen Wiig (who wrote the film along with Annie Mumolo) as Annie, a down-and-out baker who is asked to be the maid of honor in the wedding of her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph).  Annie has had no luck in recent months, having lost her novelty bakery to the recession, which cost her a boyfriend as well.  She shares an apartment with two lazy British roommates (Rebel Wilson and Matt Lucas), has a nagging mother (Jill Clayburgh, in her final film), and the lowest point, has an awful relationship with an obnoxious hunk (Jon Hamm) who just uses her for sex. 

Planning a wedding might have come as a welcome distraction, but it quickly turns out to be anything but as bridesmaid egos clash, plans go devastatingly wrong and budgets go overboard, all of which threaten the survival of Annie and Lillian's lifelong friendship.  The wedding-from-hell also risks Annie's chance at love again when a cute Irish cop (Chris O'Dowd) takes an interest and tries to get her motivated out of her current misery.

Wiig was funny as hell in this - if you're a fan of her on Saturday Night Live, you'll love her here, especially her drunken meltdown on a flight to Las Vegas.  But the scene stealer was Mike & Molly's Melissa McCarthy as bridesmaid Megan, the no-nonsense sister of the groom who has so many deadpan one-liners (among them: suggesting that the bridal shower have a Fight Club theme) that I can't imagine how many alternate takes they must have of some of her scenes.

Like I mentioned earlier, the movie is also totally gross.  I'm not always the biggest fan of gross-out comedies, but the infamous food-poisoning scene was insanely funny - again McCarthy steals the show here, in ways you don't even want to imagine. 

The movie wasn't perfect, I thought it ran a little long and some of the characters seemed a bit underdeveloped.  And I can't wait to see Jon Hamm in a movie when he's not playing a prick.  But it was still a hilariously funny movie.  I've heard it called the "female Hangover," but I would compare it more to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which was also a raunchy comedy covering for what turned out to be a sweet story in the end. 

So Bridesmaids is definitely worth checking out, even if you've never been in a wedding.  It's even worth checking out if you're a guy - it's still that funny.

Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark

Oh, Spiderman 3...all is forgiven.

Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, the $65 million behemoth directed by Julie Taymor (The Lion King) with songs by U2's Bono and The Edge, has been in previews on Broadway since last November.  Normally, preview performances for a Broadway show last about 2-3 weeks before it officially opens.  But as everyone knows by now, Spidey's much-delayed Broadway debut, which is still in previews, has been anything but normal. 

Originally scheduled to open over a year ago, the production literally ran out of money and shut down for months until a new investor could be found.  Rehearsals and preview performances were plagued by production delays, and even worse, several actors were seriously injured thanks to the show's complicated flying stunts.  To make matters worse, despite the fact the show was playing virtually sold out every night, word quickly spread that while the special effects (when they worked) were great, the show itself was a dud.  Critics, fed up with ongoing delays, went forward with their reviews back in February, and needless to say, the reviews were brutal. 

Well, the powers-that-be have taken action and Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark is set to close down later this month, delaying its opening night for the sixth time while the production undergoes a major overhaul.  Director Julie Taymor has been canned, Bono and The Edge have been summoned to write new music, and the choreographer has been replaced.

So is this show really so bad?  I saw it Saturday night, and put simply, the answer is...yep, it's terrible.

I left the Foxwoods Theatre convinced of two things:  that I don't think Julie Taymor has ever read a Spiderman comic book, and that Bono and The Edge have never seen a musical.  The story is a confusing, muddled mess, and the while the rock score was enjoyable (I'm a big U2 fan, so I can't hate on them too much), the lyrics of the songs were virtually incomprehensible.

The biggest mistake of Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark is that instead of choosing from a wealth of Spiderman stories to build a show around, Taymor decided to base the whole thing in Greek mythology, complete with a "Geek Chorus," four comic book geeks who narrate the show to the audience as they create their ultimate Spiderman story.  Now, I know geeks.  I'm proud to be one myself.  Real geeks would have come up with a better Spiderman story than this.  The Geek Chorus was reportedly supposed to represent Taymor, Bono, The Edge, and co-writer Glen Berger...which makes me think the show needs an even bigger theater than the Foxwoods to contain all of the egos behind this production.

But in reality, the Geek Chorus is just there as filler to keep the audience distracted (not entertained, because the Geeks were not even remotely entertaining) as the massive sets are changing around behind them.  Whenever their scenes are done, they sat on the side of the stage with the same glazed-over expressions as the rest of the audience had for most of the show.  You know it's bad when one of the ushers has to start the applause when the audience stayed silent after one of the songs ended.

Now, about those massive sets.  Visually, this show is stunning.  The way they did the perspective on the buildings, the projection screens...even the flying, which thankfully went off without incident at our performance, was actually really cool.  "Bouncing Off The Walls," a song in Act 1 when Peter Parker wakes up with his Spiderman powers and goes running and down the walls of his bedroom and then takes on the bullies at school while Batman-style "BAM!" "WHACK!" "POW!" signs flashed in the background, was a fun scene that I hope survives the upcoming show overhaul. We were sitting in the cheap seats up in the balcony, and Spiderman even managed to land in our section a few times, much to the delight of a little boy sitting in our row who yelled "OH MY GOD!  SPIDERMAN!" the first time that happened.

The problem was, the sets and special effects were too much, and far too distracting.  I kept thinking of a scene in Monty Python's Spamalot where King Arthur complains that they've gotten lost "in a dark, and very expensive forest."  They couldn't just have Peter and Mary Jane's houses, they had to have versions of their entire street folding in and out as they walked on a treadmill track as if they were walking all through Queens, while a miniture subway train kept rolling on and off the stage.  Sure, you could definitely see the $65 million up on that stage...you're just left wondering why they needed to blow it on such unnecessary stuff on the set. 

Getting back to that muddled mess of a story, at the beginning of Act 1, one of the Geeks suggests bringing in the character of Arachne, a woman who, according to Greek mythology, was transformed into a spider after defeating the goddess Athena at weaving.  So while Act 1 loosely follows the story of the first Spiderman film, the Arachne character randomly pops in and out of the story for some reason.  Is she Spidey's nemesis?  Guardian angel?  Who the hell knows.  What we do know is that she's there at the expense of Uncle Ben and Aunt May, who are totally underused.  Uncle Ben is hit by car instead of shot by a robber and never even tells Peter the "with great power comes great responsibility" line, and by Act 2, Aunt May is mostly reduced to a cameo.  Even J. Jonah Jameson isn't given much to do.

Arachne's most puzzling moment comes in Act 2, which is when Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark truly descends into madness.  Furiously jealous of Peter/Spidey's relationship with Mary Jane, Arachne plans to attack, but not before sending her army of spider-women to loot Manhattan shoe stores and perform a song dancing in high-heeled shoes.

Seriously.  That happened.

So where are the good villians?  Well, the Green Goblin is in Act 1.  He plays a mean piano, too.  I'm not kidding - he plays Rodgers and Hart's "I'll Take Manhattan" on the top of the Chrysler Building in front of a captive Spiderman.  We don't know why.  He's also dead by the end of Act 1, so we're stuck with Arachne for most of Act 2.  Arachne employs the Sinister Six (The Lizard, Kraven, Electro, Carnage, Swarm, and a new character called Swiss Miss) to wreak havoc in Act 2, but they don't do much more than show up on a fashion show-type runway to show off their cool costumes.  The Goblin shows up again as well, but in the end we learn that all of it was an illusion by Arachne and none of the villians were ever really there in the first place.  At this point we were all wishing we weren't there in the first place either.

Also missing are Spiderman's trademark wisecracks, or any development of Peter Parker as a character.  Spidey was played by Matthew James Thomas at our performance, and I thought he had a great voice and could have been a terrific Spiderman with the right material to work with.  Unfortunately, Taymor and crew seemed to think that once they got him flying, they didn't need to do anything else with him.  Same goes for Jennifer Damiano as Mary Jane - great voice, got to repeat a lot of Kirsten Dunst-type lines from the movies, but she didn't have much else to do.

As far as the music...like I said earlier, I'm a big U2 fan, so I did like parts of the score.  In fact, I'd love for U2 to grab some of this music back and use it on a future album.  The show had some decent songs, like the show's anthem, Rise Above, and Spidey's big eleven o'clock number, The Boy Falls From The Sky is another highlight.  But they're rock songs, and instead of moving the story along, they grind it to a halt.  Earlier on Saturday, I saw the matinee performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  Now, that's a 50-year-old musical.  But those songs were the ones I was still humming to myself after leaving Spiderman.  I couldn't remember how a single song from Spiderman went afterwards without having to look it up.

Before Spiderman started previews last year, 60 Minutes ran a behind-the-scenes look at the troubled production, which you can watch here.  Sadly, this show's troubles were only just getting started when the segment aired, but one comment, by producer Michael Cohl stood out for me.  Discussing the show's massive budget, he said that "No one wants to see the $25 million Spiderman." 

Well...if the $25 million Spiderman had some better songs, a coherent story, and wouldn't leave everyone holding their breath hoping that no one gets hurt every time an actor goes up on the wires, then yeah, I would totally take the $25 million Spiderman over this bloated mess.  I felt bad for the entire cast, who was so talented and clearly working their asses off on that stage.  They deserve a better show...and so does Spiderman.