The Wolverine: Should Be R-Rated.

(Yeah, spoilers ahead.)

At least it’s a superhero movie on a human-ish scale.

No utter destruction of faux-Manhattan with thousands of off-screen (to save the PG-13 rating) people dying from CGI superbeings careening through CGI skyscrapers. No Dr. Zhivago-ish runtime. No clumsy Jesus allusions. And, best of all, it partially erases the lingering stench of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which seriously lowered the bar for all high-budget superhero flicks to come after it.

Boiled down, The Wolverine is a decent chase movie with a muddled final showdown. It’s not nearly as much popcorn fun as The Avengers but (thank god) not nearly as gratingly boring as the latest re-reboot of Superman. It’s a relatively tight stand-alone episode for our lone wolf protagonist. Enjoyable, but doesn’t leave much an an impression.

And I’ve wondered why. It’s Wolverine vs. Yakuza and ninjas. How can that go wrong?

It’s that damn PG-13 rating.

But it’s not that I want more blood on the screen. What I want is more impact. Wolverine, or at least this Wolverine movie, can’t adapt the PG-13 restrictions as easily as other recent superhero movies. For example, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy felt dark but not de-fanged because the hero mostly punches the shit out of people and Nolan has great skill in amping up a few horrific moments so that they color the rest of the movie (see: the Joker making a pencil “disappear” into an enemy’s brain). Also, the nightmarish scarecrow imagery.

But Wolverine dispatches baddies by STABBING THEM TO DEATH WITH HIS CLAWS. Brutally. He kills a lot of people in the movie, but they’re the sort of deathless deaths of a PG-13 movie. Where the bad guys maybe grunt and fall down. Or, if they’re hit really hard by something, pinwheel off while the camera pans away. There is no terror, pain, or blood.

Usually, these deathless movie deaths are fine. But the main dilemma Wolverine has for most of Act Two is that his healing powers have been shut off–he’s been rendered mortal, weakened. He could be killed like any of the faceless rabble he spends much of the movie ostensibly slicing to pieces. But since death has been established as a trivial thing, an event without much impact, Wolverine’s mortality feels more like a gimmick for the trailer rather than an emotional anchor for the movie.

With the PG-13 rating, you also lose impact with specific set piece scenes. When one of the characters foresees Wolverine dying while holding his own heart, I perked up a quite a bit. I wanted to know how will we get to this point? What circumstances would lead to Wolverine holding his own heart Temple of Doom-style? But when the plot finally spooled up to that moment, it was disappointment city. What could have been a squirmy, gutpunch moment like the self-surgery in Prometheus or the future-past amputation in Looper turned out to be a few bland shadow puppet-y shots amidst the clatter of yet another rote fight scene.

I wonder when we’ll get a mainstream major superhero movie with an R rating. An R rating would narrow the audience, so it’d narrow the budget, so it’d narrow the scope and effects, but that’s not a bad thing. Not at all. Cut out some of the often interminable battle scenes, shrink the run-time a bit, focus on developing characters rather than divvying up lines for a team of expensive A-list actors… and create moments of impact rather than spectacle. We’ve seen spectacle. The audiences are getting all spectacled out. Or, at least, I am.

The Wolverine almost gets there, but since the filmmakers decided to cast the wide audience net with the PG-13, he’s trapped in a world of deathless death and sexless sex and for all the sweat Hugh Jackman puts in showing us a wounded, feral Wolverine battling both his nightmares and ninjas, it all feels a bit toothless.