Okay. That was a lot of action.
Seriously, these bad guys don’t know the meaning of overkill. This episode was worth watching, if only to see the ridiculous amount and size of all the things they threw at Wolverine, to just prevent him from ascending that freakishly long Hell Road. It was a complete carnage what happened there. i mean, this show takes fighting goons to a different level.
It’s a shame that this episode was clearly partly outsourced, because the direction of all of this chaos was really good. The bad guys just kept coming with new and different ways to try and kill Wolverine and this flowed very neatly from one action scene to the other, with interesting camera angles and and animation. Especially the fight with the thousand deadly spears looked wonderful, but as the episode went on there were just too many “one frame action scenes”. You know, the one in which the creators just show one single frame with a bunch of a sounds over it. It works for some series, but the previous episodes of Wolverine set themselves apart by exactly NOT doing that. The biggest hint to the outsourcing however was how the creators couldn’t decide how large the army of Yukio’s grandfather was. That shot of them, walking up Hell Road was probably the worst of this entire episode.
At this point, Wolverine has pretty much surpassed Iron Man in every conceivable way, aside from perhaps the background catchiness (seriously, near the end I was just watching Iron Man to hear that kickass background tune of theirs). The setting is a lot more solid, the plot is simple, yet effective, the action takes itself seriously and is well paced (and most importantly: really not formulaic aside from the fact that Wolverine keeps winning), the characters also aren’t going to win any awards, but they still do their job by being interesting to watch and everyone having their own motivations that isn’t a complete cornball. I wouldn’t call this series a complete success yet, because I’ve seen tons of action series that built up to a grand finale that never came (Sengoku Basara, High School of the Dead), but so far I’m enjoying this show much more than I thought I would after Iron Man.
Oh, and yeah, for those who didn’t know yet: the director of Basilisk and Afro Samurai is going to direct the X-Men. Oh boy. This really depends on what kind of scriptwriter they got here, but if that guy is good (meaning that he manages to come up with a good backstory, rather than what happened to Afro Samurai), then we’re really in for something interesting here.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
