This move is based on the 1982 comic series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. It begins in 1945, when Logan is held prisoner in a Japanese internment camp near Nagasaki. During the atomic bombing of the city, he saves the life of an officer named Ichiro Yashida (Ken Yamamura). In the present day, Logan is living like a hermit in the Yukon, tormented by dreams and hallucinations of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) whom he killed at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand, to save the world from her out-of-control destructive power. The closest thing he has to a friend, a bear who lives nearby, is shot by a poisoned arrow fired by boorish hunters. He euthanizes the bear and seeks out the hunters in a bar, intending to kill them. They are saved by a mutant woman from Japan named Yukio, who tells him, “Don’t worry; they’ll all die in the same truck in a few weeks.” She can, in fact, know when someone is going to die.
She has been sent by Ichiro, the man he saved in Nagasaki (now played by Haruhiko Yamanouchi) who is near death. Logan goes to Japan to say good-bye, but Ichiro offers to take Logan’s tortured immortal existence off his hands and take it on himself. He is the powerful CEO of a technology zaibatsu and wants to live forever. Logan refuses.
He becomes involved with Ichiro’s grand-daughter Mariko, played by Tao Okamoto, and when she is kidnapped, he finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy concerning Ichiro’s will. Logan must battle Yakuza gangsters and Ninja warriors, particularly in an amazing scene on the roof of a speeding Bullet train, a mutant killer named Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), and finally an adversary wearing towering adamantium armour.
This one is less frenetic and mind-blowing than some X-Men movies, which feature dozens of powerful antagonists, but it is still an intense and well-crafted action movie, with glorious Japanese backdrops and impressive battle choreography. Logan, poisoned nearly to death by Venom, is less indestructible than usual and suffers like Indiana Jones on a bad day. Of course, his imminent demise is predicted by Yukio’s vision, and she is sort of right.