This is getting ridiculous. After Fox debuted seven seconds of the upcoming trailer for “The Wolverine,” the latest Hugh Jackman-with-claws superhero epic, on social media site Vine, they have taken to generously providing the world with twenty whole seconds of footage, this time courtesy of MTV. And what of the twenty seconds? Well, they do look promisingly cool, even if, the entire time, we were thinking, Man this would have been infinitely cooler if Darren Aronofsky had followed through. Snikt!
The footage (for those who are region-locked out of it — Fox apparently hasn’t gotten the memo about the importance of international box office these days) starts out with Wolverine at what appears to be a yakuza garden party (or possibly a wedding), where someone shoots him, which is what often happens at a yakuza garden party. There are shirtless guys with crazy tattoos, ninjas, Buddhist monks, a woman with striking pink hair who wields a sword (Rila Fukushima as Yukio, as seen in images yesterday). From there we see Wolverine wake up in some kind of medical lab, intoning, “What they did to me, what I am… it can’t be undone.” Then we see a few shots of Wolverine battling a samurai against a lighting-streaked sky. The samurai cuts him, and a voice, seemingly replying to Wolverine’s dialogue, says, mysteriously, “Don’t be so sure.”
As far as a twenty-second teaser goes, it was pretty good. The full trailer drops tomorrow, but this glimpse seems promising, and we’re increasingly optimistic. James Mangold is a solidly dependable, if overly workmanlike, filmmaker, and the script was at least worked on by some talented folks, with Christopher McQuarrie‘s original draft rewritten by “Out of Sight” scribe Scott Frank (Mark Bomback contributed at some point along the way as well).
“The Wolverine” (now apparently in 3D) hits on July 26th.