Good message, horrendous execution

Rating: 3/10 (30 December 2015)

I went into this movie hoping that maybe IMDb's current 6.7 rating might not be entirely accurate, and maybe it would be better. I love most of the other X-Men movies, so my hopes were high. I was right; the rating wasn't accurate, but The Wolverine merits a far lower rating.
Though "The Wolverine" had a good message of appreciating what you have while you have it, it is overshadowed by absurd amounts of blood, gore, and violence that really puts it more in the R range than the PG-13 range. Even the overarching point of the movie, Wolverine's struggle to come to terms with his immortality, is never really resolved. He only re-accepts his invulnerability because the current situation demands that he be an unstoppable killing machine. I understand some people say that "this is the Wolverine audiences were waiting for," but I'm not sure I personally can like a main character who guts his opponents first and asks questions later.
Wolverine's struggle against his 'inner demons' also comes to nothing by the end of the movie. We get a gripping intro with his chronic nightmare of killing Jean Grey over and over, which could have been a very good plot device if it had followed through on itself. However, every other time he has a nightmare, Jean just ends up giving him vague advice or talking him into killing himself. And then, to cap it all off, Wolverine kisses and sleeps with Mariko. Having just blatantly disregarded what appeared to be undying love for Jean, he then proceeds to, very hypocritically, attack Mariko's fiancée because he was cheating on her.
Then comes the self-vivisection scene. While desperate times do call for desperate and sometimes violent measures, I feel like the amount of blood and gore in this scene was unnecessary. It felt like the movie was trying to be too dark for its' own good. We also never get a clear explanation of how Viper kissing Wolverine at the beginning resulted in a robotic spider clinging to his heart.
A few plot details are finally revealed in the final battle that make the movie feel like a little less of a blood-horror movie. Unfortunately, the movie leaves itself very little time to turn Yashida instead of Viper into the main villain. The Silver Samurai reveal felt sort of forced, having only been introduced as a possible threat in the previous scene as a blueprint on the floor of Yashida's home. Then, somehow, Yashida is able to draw out Wolverine's genetic mutation through his claws, even though we saw earlier it was heart problems that kept the healing powers from working. Then Wolverine once again makes an unnecessary kill, as Yashida is dying a painful death anyway, and Wolverine decides it needs to be more painful and stabs him with his crude bone claws.
The addition of the bone claws themselves also opens up a plot-hole that hurts "Days of Future Past;" Wolverine somehow needed to regain his metal claws. To be fair, "Days of Future Past" could have explained that, but in light of the gravity of the situation, it's understandable that it simply ignores this rather troubling-to-fix issue.
Besides the moral message I mentioned earlier, the one redeeming part of this graphic kill-fest is the after-credits scene, showing Magneto and Professor X as allies recruiting Wolverine to fight an enemy that is, according to Magneto, more dangerous than anything they've faced before.
Unfortunately, a lead-in to the next movie, however fantastic that movie may have ended up being, cannot be one of only two redeeming qualities in a movie. While I love seeing a good bit of Wolverine action, this movie took it too far and sacrificed having a likable character for a bloody action show.