The Wolverine (dir James Mangold, 2013)

Yesterday my wife, sister and daughter all trotted off to London to see Lee Nelson's alcopop-themed musical Wicked!, leaving me solus for the day looking after my son Dan and his same-age cousin John. So I took them to see The Wolverine, and by gum they loved it. There was lots of bouncing up and down in their seats, enthusiastic gobbling down of sweeties and above all laughing; which struck me as exactly the right frame of mind in which to enjoy a film like this. Early on Dan hit on the comedic strategy of repeating something that had just happened on screen, but prefacing his comment with a sarcastic 'oh that's a good idea!' Viz.: 'oh that's a good idea! fall off the really fast train!' 'oh that's a good idea! have your claws chopped off by the biggy robot!' 'oh that's a good idea! get a sword in your tummy!' Every time he said one of these, John and he would cackle and laugh like they were about to burst with sheer hilarity. It must have prodigiously pissed-off the hardcore X-Men fans also in the cinema with us, many of whom were late-teenager boys with leather jackets and sour expressions on their faces. So that was a bonus. Dan and John also had a series of, I think, rather pertinent questions, amongst which were:

'Why is he in that hole?'
'How does he wipe his bottom with those swords in his hands?'
'Why is his hair like that? Is it electricity standing up his hair?'
John: 'where's that?' Me (sotto voce): 'Japan.' John: 'why does he go to Japan? Why doesn't he go to London?'
'Why is that girl's tongue a snake?'
'Is the archer a goody or baddy?' [I have no idea of the answer this one, by the way]
'Dad, you never told me why he was in that hole! Daad!'

...and so on. I worried that they'd be too young (they're not yet 6); but in the event their attitude to the film was exactly right, and they came out whooshing and imaginary-fighting and had a whale of a time.

My main problem with the film was that the actress playing the love interest, Mariko (Tao Okamoto) was so thin she looked actively poorly. On the other hand, her complete lack of chemistry with Huge Ackman was, in a way, a testament to the Japanese immersion of the movie (on, you know, the popcorn level at which movies like this work): the Wolverine looked so like a huge reeky hirsuite brute of a thing, the very image of a hairy foreign devil, that I simply couldn't see what Mariko saw in him. Plus, their tender farewell scene went like this:

She (hugging him tenderly): please tell me you'll come back to Japan to see your princess?

He (gruff): I can't. I'm a soldier etc. etc.

Instead of like this:

She: Just to sum up, you killed my beloved grandfather, and you also killed my father who was a bit of a dick but, you know, my father for all that, so now I have literally no relatives left alive. You tried to kill my fiancé by throwing him out of a skyscraper window. You vandalised the bullet train and smashed up one of what is now my corporation's most valuable research institutes, causing billions of yen of damage. Plus I understand you killed your previous girlfriend. Remind me why I hopped into bed, or rather onto the futon, with you?

He: Is that the time? I really must be going

That said, I did enjoy it. Better than Wolverine: Origins, certainly. Although that's tantamount to saying 'Better than a dose of amoebic dysentery' and therefore not a particularly useful critical discriminator.

When I mentioned that I might take the boys to see this movie, Julie, my sister, replied: 'oh Brian [her husband] saw that! He really liked it. You have to stay until after the credits, though. Apparently there's an easter egg scene in which you see Magenta!' Colourful. She's not the world's biggest X-Men fan, my sister. Although she assures me she likes watching Huge Ackman in his vest.