A couple of schools of thought on giant Samurai robots wielding flaming-hot 10-foot swords: One is that they add spice to the gumbo at noisy blockbusters like “The Wolverine.” Another is that they always show up in the wrong movies: Anytime Ethan Hawke is on the screen sharing his feelings about relationships, for instance, I pray for a metal fist the size of a Mini Cooper to slam him in the Adam’s apple, but it never seems to happen.
“The Wolverine,” competently directed by James Mangold (“Walk the Line”), is a serviceable superhero movie, one that might be thrilling if special-effects pictures came along four times a year instead of four times a month. As it is, I found myself spending most of it thinking, “I guess this is going to be a fight scene. Here comes a chase. Another fight. Another chase. Aren’t these villains falling like dandelions versus a weed whacker? Why is Wolverine impervious to a sword through the heart but captured when a bunch of arrows hit him in the back?” But our president has advised us that “We can’t take comfort in just being cynical.” So there goes my favorite hobby.
The follow-up to 2009’s “Wolverine” (will the trilogy be completed with “A Wolverine”?) gets going in 1945, when Wolverine/Logan (Hugh Jackman), the mutant who is super-unable to keep his shirt on, is a prisoner in a Japanese camp as the atomic bomb destroys Nagasaki. Today, the humane prison guard whose life Logan saved — I didn’t know a manhole cover could protect you from radioactivity — runs the biggest firm in Asia.
The lethal Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) holds Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) prisoner, though her actual superpowers remain questionable. (Ben Rothstein)
This aged billionaire, Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), offers Logan — who is immortal, ageless and gifted with instantaneous healing powers — a chance to unload his gifts unto his old friend, rendering Logan an ordinary mortal. This is tempting: Logan has been having dreams in which his ex-woman, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), whom he had to kill after she turned evil in “X-Men: The Last Stand,” begs him to join her in death, an option he is seriously considering. Hey, fellas, anything to stop your old lady from nagging, am I right?
Logan decides to say no, but gets involved in protecting the industrialist’s quietly sexy granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto, whose placid confidence is the best thing in the movie) while joining forces with her sword-fighting childhood friend Yukio (Rika Fukushima), who can (sort of) see the future and warns Logan that she has visions of his death.
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Everybody goes on the run from ninjas, yakuza mobsters and half a dozen members of Mariko’s family, who want the inheritance her grandfather bequeathed her as he died. This movie has a case of villain inflation that leaves surprisingly little screen time for the main malefactor, a snaky blond temptress called the Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), whose tongue is so vicious that I’m surprised they didn’t just call her “Rex Reed.”
I’m as unclear on what exactly her powers are as I am about Wolverine’s, though: She kills most of her prey instantly (with a lizard version of a French kiss), yet with Wolverine she leaves a sort of ticking bomb. Also, she can blow CGI poison crystals through the air, which looks cool but doesn’t always seem to do anything.
You might guess that I’m not a big fan of the X-Men movies, none of which I’ve seen twice. The fundamental silliness of everybody having a super-gimmick jars against both the P.C. pretensions and the dim, witless dialogue.
But I liked that “The Wolverine” (which saves a nifty twist for a surprise scene in the middle of the end credits) turns down the volume on the usual din of colliding mutant superpowers. It takes time for some old-fashioned romance (the moments when Mariko and Logan are getting to know each other are nicely done) and some reasonably scintillating action on a more human scale (the highlight is a whooshing fight atop a 300-mph train in which Wolverine fights off mobsters while alternately jumping and ducking overhead barriers). But all roads lead to that giant Samurai robot and the extreme man-manicure he plans to give poor Wolverine. There’s teeming bombast and great gushers of villainy, but we’ve seen it all before and we’ll see it all again, probably next week.