Worth seeing for a deep dive into Wolverine

Rating: 7/10 (1 August 2013)

I appreciated this movie on a number of levels. For one, it tried to be different from its predecessors by not getting carried away by spectacle. I like epic super-hero movies but they don't all have to be that way. Sometimes they just need a little quiet time, to reflect on who they are and where they are going. For another, it maintained continuity with both X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men III: The Last Stand, so that we don't feel like the filmmakers are re-inventing the character and thumbing what other directors have done with him.
This movie was introspective. Wolverine knows basically where he came from now. He joined Professor X but obviously didn't stick around the school. He suffers from chronic nightmares. And he suffers from a sense of purposelessness, which is what leads a lot of people to MDD (major depressive disorder) and suicide. But Wolverine doesn't age (at least not like most people), and heals so quickly that he's very hard to kill. What to do? The movie helps to reset him, to remind them that his fate is tied to a purpose. He just needs to stop moping around about his condition and own it.
Some of the action sequences are tremendous, especially the train. You don't have to knock down skyscrapers to have a breathtaking fight scene.
Hugh Jackman takes his role very seriously. He always trains for the part, and his physique is really killer now. Unlike other actors like Christian Bale, who give up interest in playing the same super-hero, Jackman has no problem returning to the role over and over and building something new out of it. He'll be back again for X-Men: Days of Future Past. He is the only actor to appear in all of the X-Men movies playing Wolverine, with only a few seconds in X-Men First Class (which itself was a great film, but with continuity problems otherwise), and it helps to tie the franchise together. (Days of Future Past is rumored to try to fix some of the continuity errors, but we'll see.) I am to the point that I want to see a Hugh Jackman movie, no matter what it is. He's arrived as a great action star.