Sixth time's the charm for Wolverine

Hugh Jackman changing a tire. Hugh Jackman learning how to file his taxes online. Hugh Jackman ordering a sandwich, and then taking it back and complaining because, well, "Wolverine don't do mayonnaise."

These are just some of the plots that could have bested the last Wolverine movie, the atrociously written X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the one with Ryan Reynolds and that singer with all the extra punctuation in his name. I'm happy to report that its sequel, simply called The Wolverine, went well beyond what was required to finally — finally! — tell an appropriate story involving the X-Men's least obnoxious figure, a man with metal-coated bones and a hairdo that has tailfins.

Jackman, hulky and bulky in layers of muscle, again returns as Logan, the brooding self-healing strongman with razor claws that eject out from between his knuckles. This is not Jackman's finest character, but he plays Wolverine with such enthusiasm and warmth that you can't help but appreciate his fondness for the lovably gruff mutant. That's why we all want these Wolverine appearances to succeed, and why we get frustrated when they don't, like they so often do.

This one finds its soul by ditching all the other mutants and focusing largely on Logan and his troubled history following the cataclysmic events of X-Men: The Last Stand. For large swaths of the film's Japanese setting, The Wolverine features only Logan doing very Logany things: he rambles through forests, he revisits his past, he convinces himself that he's not worthy of love, and he's haunted by visions of his dead girlfriend, the telekinetic overlord Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who died and apparently went to a Victoria Secret store — she spends every dream in slinky little nightgowns cooing in Logan's ears.

Logan is taken to Japan by a man he meets in the opening scene, which involves a horrifying ground-level view of the nuclear bomb obliterating Nagasaki during World War II. Logan, resistant to pretty much any kind of damage including vaporizing nuclear plasma bubbles, saves a young Japanese soldier who showed him kindness. Seventy years later, the soldier is old and dying, and Logan is still his youthful self thanks to those mutant chromosomes. The retired soldier, now a tech tycoon with a vast empire, has a proposal that Logan first refuses, but later gets embroiled in against his better judgment. It begins with the Japanese mob, the Yakuza, but quickly turns into one of those too-big-to-fail corporate power struggles — because that’s what the X-Men do now, they rescue rich people.

The movie is very Japanese, with many Japanese cultural checkpoints: video-game parlors, traditional Japanese wood and paper houses, hundreds of ninjas in their footed pajamas and a bullet train, on which an action scene with a rather stupendous and wonderful finale is set. I was shocked to see in the end credits that the movie was not filmed in Japan, but rather Australia. I want to smack the producers for not filming in the story’s real country, but bravo to the set dressers; they did convincing work.

I love the plot’s solemn Japanese setting, and also the film's low-key presence: the world isn't ending, there are very few other mutants, the story is personal and intimate, not sweeping and epic, and most of the fight sequences are grounded in natural physics with an emphasis on realism. Only at the end does the movie lose its marbles when it shuffles in a giant silver samurai with swords that look more like electric hair straighteners. There's also a poison-spitting temptress, a cross between Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin and Brigitte Nielson’s Soviet princess from Rocky IV. Her dialogue, consisting mostly of drab one-liners, is all kinds of awful.

Really, though — and this will be no surprise to X-Men fans — Jackman and Wolverine are the legitimate stars here. We meet up with Logan as he wanders through the forests of the Northwest. He shares a scene with a CGI, and later animatronic, bear that seems to recognize Wolverine as his forest kin, and a worthy adversary. Director James Mangold frequently paints Wolverine as the compassionate savage, and it often works to varying degrees of success. I think fans are drawn to Wolverine mostly because Jackman is so charismatic and likable, but also because the Logan character has so much rattling up in his troubled dome. He's eternally conflicted about his past and even more so about his future. All that plays very well here, even as Jackman grunts his way through most of his action sequences.

The Wolverine is a little long, but not overly so. The action scenes are thrilling, especially that bit on the bullet train. It’s interesting to see Wolverine kill people, which he frequently does in eviscerating style. We’re so accustomed to Spider-Man, Batman and Superman handling villains with kid gloves, but here Wolverine removes threats against him with fatal force. That’s what I liked.

What I didn’t like was mostly the Viper character and the giant silver samurai, both of which worked against the film’s realistic approach to a Wolverine story. These comic-based additions reminded me too much of the other X-Men movies, which I found to be crowded and messy. The Wolverine has large sections that are clearly steps away from those movies, and I think those will thrill viewers most.

After all, the movie is called The Wolverine, not Wolverine and Friends. Rest assured that you’ll get your money’s worth of the hero you paid to see.