'The Wolverine' is born of Westerns, samurai

Superhero movies are famous for having do-gooders save the world from certain doom.

Not The Wolverine, though, and it's just one differing aspect of director James Mangold's movie (opening wide Friday), which has more in common withChinatown,Double Indemnity and The French Connection than The Avengers or Man of Steel.

Among the other non-traditional aspects: Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has mysteries to solve when he ends up in Japan to say goodbye to an old friend; he encounters a host of women with their own secrets; and there's a distinct lack of mass populations in the crosshairs of a maniacal supervillain.

"It's essentially a character piece," Mangold says. "It's really about the fortunes, the loves, the losses and the issues of these characters within the film more than it's just about another doomsday plot of one kind or another. And that makes for a very different kind of film."

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Unlike a lot of what Mangold calls "spandex movies," The Wolverine draws heavily from martial-arts movies as well as Japanese cinema and samurai culture. The story finds Logan entering an ancient world he doesn't understand with strange rules, secrets and allegiances.

The qualities one associates with Japan — duty, family, honor and history — are all things the hero "couldn't give a rat's ass about," Jackman says. "The fish-out-of-water juxtaposition of having Wolverine there is fantastic."

The main theme is the character's immortality as a result of his mutant powers, which he doesn't see as a positive. When the movie catches up with him, he's isolated in wintry wilderness, having abandoned the X-Men, killed his love, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) — to be fair, she had turned into a weapon of mass destruction in 2006'sX-Men: The Last Stand— and lost his mentor, Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart).

The fact that this torturing of a soul is not tackled in most superhero fare was appealing to Jackman. He also liked how Logan is given the chance to become normal, though that choice also is fraught with consequences.

"Pretty much everyone he loves dies — that's the curse of being this character. And in a way he wants to escape everything he's become," the actor says. "There's too much pain, too much damage, too much collateral damage everywhere he goes."

Exploring that kind of loneliness and alienation gives the story religious and mythical overtones, Mangold says.

"For a guy who never dies and who heals from anything, life becomes a series of losses in which you must keep going and persevere," he says. "The departure point of the story is a very dark place for Logan and in a way almost the predicament of a god — what is it like to have to go on forever?''

As in old-school noir movies, women turn out to be a problem for Logan — he's haunted by Jean in his dreams and falls for Mariko Yashida (Tao Okamoto), a member of one of Japan's most powerful families.

"His main kryptonite is women, really, which I always thought was really great and human about him," Jackman says.

Yet Mangold, maker of 2005's Walk the Line and 2007's 3:10 to Yuma, also wanted The Wolverine to have a Western influence. He kept talking with Jackman about the 1976 Clint Eastwood classic The Outlaw Josey Wales, enough so that the actor watched the movie as homework leading up to filming.

"He was constantly directing me in a way to keep it more and more internal," Jackman says. Logan is "tightly wound up on the inside but keeps it buried and restrained. It's not always easy. It's easier to fall into more of that ad-libbing, quippy side of Wolverine, but I think the intensity we're going for in this movie is one we haven't gotten before."

The Wolverine is not without certain superhero elements. The story's based on the classic 1982Wolverine comic-book miniseries by Frank Miller and Chris Claremont; the femme fatale Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) is a mutant who spits green acidic mist and has a snake tongue; and there is seeding for the next movie in which Wolverine will appear, next year's X-Men: Days of Future Past.

But Logan is more modeled on Eastwood in The Wolverine than on a comic-book superman.

"He doesn't have a lot of gimmicks or gizmos, he doesn't live in a world of technology, he doesn't need technology,'' Mangold says. "It's just him and his claws and his incredible strength and ability to withstand pain and survive calamity.''

In many ways, Mangold says, "the character of Logan is a very, very palpable mythical fantasy for a lot of men and women, which is this idea of having a piece of you inside you that is primal, that is feral, that is like an animal — a kind of rage and primeval emotion about the pain you felt and the injustices that have been done."

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