6. The Wolverine
Most of the way through, I really liked The Wolverine and how it approached the X-Men mythos. It stripped back all the gaudy excesses of superhero-dom, grounded the story in a Japanese folk tale and gave us the less-is-more approach to the amount of mutants in the cast. There was startling iconography witness Logans attempt to get to the tower before being stopped by ninjas an amazing fight scene atop a bullet train, and with Wolverines powers weakened, the audience couldnt just wonder why the demi-god that is Logan couldnt just wade through the hordes in his path. Yet the final act stumbled like Mel Gibson at a Bar Mitzvah awful, unwelcome and impossible to ignore. Up to this point the film had invested in subtle character beats and an unwinding conspiracy plot, and you thought there might be some big
dramatic resolution at the end of it. Ive italicised dramatic with good reason dramatic implies that while there might be fighting, the resolution will still be plausible and well leave the cinema thinking they managed to wrap up the whole cloak-and-dagger thing rather well. Yet what we got was an old man gallivanting around in a suit of adamantium armour in scenes of carnage seemingly at odds with the film. Never mind the heresy of turning the Silver Samurai into whatever
that was, the resolution that it was the old man all the time was so bad, it smacked of Scooby Doo logic. Simply put, it wasnt the ending The Wolverine deserved, and though James Mangold made it up to us with an awesome credits sequence, it still smarts a bit.