Looks like someone decided to take the Wolverine spin-off series seriously. The second installment in the Wolverine franchise - so eloquently called The Wolverine - is a huge improvement from its predecessor, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And when I say huge improvement, I mean that it’s watchable and doesn’t suck.

In this installment, Wolvy™ flies to Japan to say sayōnara to a friend he saved long ago (at the bombing of Nagasaki, to be exact), but finds trouble with ninjas who do hands-free cartwheels (awesome) and a giant steel samurai robot (double awesome). Sounds corny as I read that last sentence, but I promise 1) it’s not, and 2) I really just wanted to find a place to add hands-free cartwheeling ninjas and this is where it fit best - deal with it.

The Blu-ray

One thing that most cinephiles and most movie geeks in general love is good cover art for Blu-ray, DVD, VHS, or whatever format they’re collecting films on. The Wolverine has really great artwork; it’s slick, modern, and slices out all of that ugly and obvious Photoshop bullshit you almost always see for comic book movies that one could argue is a joke or a child made in Microsoft Paint (I can’t imagine how painful this is to the comic book artists who’ve worked on these characters for years). Thumbs up to Marvel and 20th Century Fox for getting a good artist for The Wolverine.

There’s not a whole lot of extra features with The Wolverine - it comes with the standard DVD and digital copy - but there are enough to please Wolverine and X-Men fans out there. This version comes with an alternate ending (anybody out there still like alternate endings?), a set tour of the upcoming X-Men movie, X-Men: Days of Future Past (who else is excited for this?), and five behind-the-scenes videos of The Wolverine.

Buy, rent, or avoid?

Comicbookies™ are going to buy this regardless. But if you’re a fan of solid action, and want to hear Wolverine talk serious trash and get dirty, buy this Blu-ray. It’s worth a rental if you don’t care for the franchise and just want to see a good action movie.