The Wolverine Review

Two thirds of this belong to a better film than the one it becomes. James Mangold strips Logan of his healing factor and lets him bleed, and for an hour the stakes feel physical in a way superhero pictures rarely manage. The funeral ambush is staged with real geography, the bullet train fight has a giddy sense of speed and weight, and Rila Fukushima's Yukio gives the film a second pair of eyes that actually see Logan. Hiroyuki Sanada brings a controlled menace to Shingen that the script never fully uses.

Then the last half hour arrives and the whole thing surrenders to a giant adamantium robot, a villain reveal that no one asked for, and Svetlana Khodchenkova's Viper, a performance pitched somewhere between a Bond henchwoman and a school play. Tao Okamoto is stranded playing a woman defined entirely by the men around her. Jackman has never been more comfortable in the part, quieter and slower, carrying the Jean Grey dreams with a grief the earlier films only gestured at. The problem is structural: a film that spends an hour arguing for mortality cannot end with a boss fight.