When Wolverine Went to Japan

"The Wolverine" is arguably the most underrated X-Men film and deserves a rewatch.

The Wolverine was actually called Wolverine: Samurai in Japan. Despite the katana-heavy marketing, he never actually uses the sword.

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Deadpool & Wolverine is taking the world by storm, smashing R-rated box office records and being generally viewed as an entertaining crowdpleaser. I gave it a positive review last month, calling it a “love letter to what comic book movies used to be before the Marvel Cinematic Universe standardized the formula for better and worse.” Those who grew up with this era of superhero films will get far more out of Deadpool & Wolverine’s plethora of cameos than those who did not.

Indeed, the X-Men films walked so the MCU could run. Before Disney’s massive media franchise of blockbusters became the standard template for comic book movies, 20th Century Fox hit the ground running in 2000 with bringing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s team of mutant superheroes to the silver screen.

Slickly directed by Bryan Singer and starring the likes of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier, X-Men proved to cautious studio executives that superheroes could be taken seriously when adapted to film after being a success both with critics and with audiences at the box office. Well, mostly.

The days when superhero movies had to be tryhard edgy and serious. We wouldn’t want to see colorful costumes in films based on comic books, now would we?

While X-Men and its sequel X2 were generally well-received, the quality of the franchise’s entries from the third film onward ranged from masterful to awful. The worst X-Men movies suffered from mismatched directors, poorly written scripts, and convoluted plots overstuffed with characters until the series eventually petered out in 2020 with Josh Boone’s utterly forgettable The New Mutants. 

Disney had bought Fox, and at this point the X-Men films almost felt like relics of a different age. James Mangold’s Logan and the Deadpool movies starring Ryan Reynolds were their last notable hits, being rare gems amid a sea of stale superhero films that audiences were (and still are) growing tired of. Deadpool & Wolverine is the most recent attempt to revitalize superhero films and is particularly notable for its adult-oriented R-rated content, but the road to get here was hardly a straightforward one.

Arguably the turning point for the franchise was 2013’s The Wolverine directed by James Mangold. Bringing the X-Men franchise to Japan, this film is largely forgotten by most of the public despite it being a more cerebral character study rarely seen in superhero pictures even today. This under-appreciated entry is one I’ve always championed, but moving to Japan twice since its original release has also given me a more informed perspective on how it depicts this country.

When I first saw this artwork, I knew I was in for something different than the previous X-Men films.