The Wolverine (2013)

Directed by James Mangold

The first thing I said when I returned home after watching this movie was, in answer to my wife's query, “It's really nice to go to a comic book movie where the heroes' objective is not 'saving the world'!” Sure, there is plenty of over-the-top action here, there, and yonder, from start to finish but especially toward the end (although the far superior and most memorable sequence is the 300-mph fight atop the bullet-train much earlier), but this is primarily a character story with both an inner and an outer conflict springing from the very nature of The Wolverine. Inner, Logan's actions at the end of the chronologically previous X-Men movie, The Last Stand, literally haunting him with the knowledge that his mutant healing factor makes him potentially immortal while all he loves will eventually die; outer, a Japanese business magnate, Yashida, whose life Logan saved almost seventy years ago at Nagasaki, not understanding that reality – though he thinks he does – striving from his death bed to steal that potential for eternal life for himself. Add a large dose of family and political conflict as well as conflicting issues of love, loyalty, and honor in the exotic locale of Japan and you end up with what I think is perhaps the best story of any of the X-Men franchise.

Cheers! ... and Thanks for reading!