It's an improvement on X-Men Origins: Wolverine but it could still be better

Rating: 6/10 (1 August 2013)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine was such a horrible movie that I was a bit suspicious going into this. Now, luckily it's a lot better than that in that it's actually watchable and I enjoyed it at times. I watched it in 2D (I hate 3D) so I can't say whether the 3D effects were done well or not.
Hugh Jackman is most definitely the Wolverine. He nails the role and he's really never at fault with these movies. The problems are in other areas of the movie. Rila Fukushima does a pretty good job as Yukio for a first performance. Other performances weren't anything special but not bad either.
There were some quite funny bits in the movie. Loved the hotel part especially and the bar scene in the beginning. Wolverine's grumpiness worked really well in these scenes. Japan was a cool setting for the movie and offered some good possibilities for misunderstandings and so on. The bullet train action scene was also quite intense. It was maybe the highlight of the movie which was surprising as it looked a bit goofy in the trailer.
The pacing of the movie was a bit off as I was wondering a couple of times about how much there was still to go in the movie. Cinematography was so-so. There was some really annoying shaky cam in the action sequences that almost made me ill. Look to the Bourne movies if you want a model on how to use shaky cam in your movie. The use of shaky cam was especially puzzling because Wolverine was fighting ninjas a lot of the time. Why wouldn't you want us to have a clearer look of that? Shouldn't it be nicely choreographed and so on?
The theme of the movie was immortality and how you can have meaning despite of that. I think it's an interesting theme and I hoped they would've explored that a bit more. Then again this movie was PG-13 so maybe they couldn't do that because they didn't want to alienate the younger viewers. You could really see that they tried to keep the age rating as low as possible in the amount of blood that's in the movie. Never have so many died with so little blood being spilled. A bit of an exaggeration maybe but you get the point.
The plot was only serviceable but the movie really focused more on the characters anyway. The whole world isn't at stake here and the movie takes a more intimate approach. Wolverine's arc during the movie was quite interesting as he tried to deal with his past and find new meaning for his life. The ending was a bit too cartoonish and predictable for my taste. It also deviated too much from the tone of the rest of the movie.
The Wolverine is definitely in the right direction but there's still much that could be improved. The movie needs more focus and it needs to do a better job at creating an emotional connection with the characters. A higher than PG-13 rating would also be nice to see to really allow for a more interesting movie. Still, I wouldn't say I wasted two hours watching this movie.