Criminal waist

Rating: 1/10 (4 April 2016)

Considering how much I liked 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine' I was actually exited about this movie; especially when I heard it was going to be set in Japan and have a lot of elements of a Yakuza film. I love Japan, especially in Superheroes. And in my naivety I thought there was no way they could botch this. Oh how wrong I was. Following the events of 'X-Men: Last Stand' Wolverine is living by himself and rocking a hobo beard up in Alaska. He is found by another mutant named Yukio who has been sent to find Wolerine. As it turns out he had an old friend from Japan whose life he once saved. The friend is now the head of a powerful Yakuza family but is also dying. Wolverine goes to pay him his last respects but gets caught up in all kinds of family power struggles. This is the set up to an awesome movie and in the hands of a different creative team it might have worked but not here, not with this director, not with these writers, not with these producers, and certainly not with this cast. I know Wolverine is supposed to be a bad ass but if you take out the word bad you're just left with an ass and that's what he in this movie. He's not the hero anymore, he's this obnoxious hero stand-in who we're keeping around until a real hero can be found. The Yakuza angle in this movie is way underutilized, sure there are some cool action scenes but they're shot so poorly and use so much CGI that they end up being boring. I should never be able to say that about a man with claws fighting a pair of guys on top of a speeding train, with katanas and guns! With the exception of Yukio and Wolverine, but only because there's so much of him, the characters in this movie are bland especially the weak villains, the worst offender is Madam Hydra who is technically an Avengers villains but she's also a mutant so she's kinda stuck in the middle and they apparently had to cut back some of her aspects which may be why she is so one dimensional; Poison Ivy from 'Batman & Robin' was more interesting because at least she had a personality. Wolverine's character development in this is nonexistent; his main thing is that he losses his regenerative powers briefly which might have been interesting if it was actually used but instead it just serves to try and make the fight scenes more interesting. This movie's cardinal sin is its run time, two hours but not like 'Lord of the Rings' where every minute is important but because Superhero movies are supposed to be two hours and so we need to pad this film out. This movie takes a perfect concept and completely waists it.