Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Another perfectly acceptable action movie.  That’s really all that can be said about “The Wolverine”.  The summer of 2013 has been chock full of them.  You spend two hours of your life watching them and soon afterwards, you forget that they even existed.  One tries not to think about how many other languages one could have learned or how many instruments on could learn to play in the time one spends watching mediocre action movies.

That said, there is one thing that does make “The Wolverine” somewhat memorable.  Fighting on top of a bullet train travelling at 300 miles per hour.  It’s a new take on an old classic and it’s done really well.  Imagine the effects of a 300 mile per hour wind on the human body and add knives and adamantium claws.  You get the idea.

I am told by people that are dorkier than I that “The Wolverine” follows reasonably closely to the comic of the same name.  Logan has left humanity to be as alone as possible in the great Alaskan north after being forced to kill his lover, Jean Grey, in a prior movie.  He is tracked down and summoned to Japan by a man whose life he once saved in Nagasaki during World War II.  The man is dying and he wants to give Logan the gift of mortality by transplanting his immortality into the old man’s body.

So far, so good.  But this is a movie based off of a comic so we have to convolute things a bit now, don’t we?  So let’s say that the old man decides that his granddaughter should be the one to inherit his business empire for absolutely no good reason whatsoever and have a bunch of people that want to kill her as a result.  Or maybe just kidnap her.  Or kidnap her and then kill her.  Possibly kill her and then kidnap her.  Now we’re talking!  Now let’s add a ninja clan whose purpose doesn’t make sense led by a former love interest of the granddaughter, a scientist who can spit poison and can only die when it’s convenient, and a fifteen foot tall robot samurai.  Oh, we also need Logan to fall in love with the granddaughter he conveniently swore to protect for some reason.

Confused yet?  Don’t worry, there’s more!  I’ll leave you to discover it all for yourself, though.  Comics are basically soap operas for geeks.