10 Awesome Movies That Fail In The 3rd Act

James Mangold's The Wolverine in many ways functioned as an apology for 2009's aggressively mediocre X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and for the bulk of its runtime adapted Wolverine's (Hugh Jackman) beloved Japanese comic book arc to the screen with style and feeling.

Between Hugh Jackman's excellent performance as Logan, the striking and unique setting, and delirious action sequences, this felt like everything that its messy, mostly unsatisfying predecessor wasn't.

And then that third act happened.

The Wolverine's third reel has a pungent whiff of studio intervention about it, so jarringly does it switch things up into the sort of thing clueless executives think audiences want to see.

It's revealed that Ichirō Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), who was believed to have passed away earlier in the film, in fact faked his own death, has used Logan's regenerative capabilities to de-age himself, and is now commanding a gigantic silver robot, the Silver Samurai, to fight Wolverine.

It's another case of a more restrained, character-driven comic book film deigning to wacky CGI-smothered schlock because that's what's apparently expected, even though it doesn't service the story or tone at all.

Thankfully Mangold didn't make the same mistake in 2017's follow-up, Logan.