The Wolverine (2013)

  I remember the hype when this movie came out and I had intended to watch it then but well, things happened and I never got around to it until this weekend.

Logan (Hugh Jackman) has isolated himself deep in the woods of Alaska or Canada (some place cold) in order to grieve over the death of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen).  Remember X3:  The Last Stand?  Yeah, no one else does either.  Anyway, Logan is drawn into a bar fight after having to put down a bear that had been shot with a poison arrow (FORESHADOWING!) and he meets Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a Japanese mutant sent to find him on behalf of her employer, Mr. Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi).  Logan saved Yashida from the nuclear blast in Nagasaki and, on his deathbed, Yashida invites Logan to his compound in order to say good-bye.  Once in Japan, however, Logan is embroiled in all the creepy machinations of the Yashida clan, including a plot to kill the hot granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto).

This movie is... okay.  It probably would have been great in 2013 but in a post-Logan world, it just can't measure up.  Eventually, I'm going to do a full series re-watch of all the pre-Disney X-Men films and we can do more analysis then when it's all in context.  For now, there are some excellent fight scenes, especially the bullet train sequence, but the love story feels very cliché and the villains are a little underbaked.  James Mangold >>>> Bryan Singer, though.