Near the beginning of this film, Hugh Jackman is looking curiously like he did at the start of Les Miserables. He's out in the wild, scruffy of mane, bushy of beard and not a happy Yukon camper.
More worryingly, there soon comes a noise that sounds like a wounded grizzly bear. What's Russell Crowe's Javert doing in this? No, that's actually a wounded grizzly bear - he was Logan/Wolverine's woodland neighbour until felled by a poison-tipped arrow. Off to town Wolverine heads, to have a quiet word to the archer.
But just as he's cutting a swathe through the hunter folk in a local bar, the most famous of the X-Men mutants encounters a teenage ninja - fuchsia-haired, katana-wielding Yukio (Rila Fukushima), who makes him an offer he doesn't quite understand: come to Japan to see the man whose life you saved at the end of World War II.
That brief wartime episode, set in a Nagasaki prisoner of war camp, neatly parallels the Nazi concentration camp experiences of the young Magneto in the first X-Men movie and the great 2011 prequel. It makes for an impressively bold prologue to this, the more satisfying but still patchy second Wolverine spin-off after the lacklustre 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
That opening has razor-knuckled Logan saving a Japanese officer, Yashida, from the atomic blast. Years later, the contemporary timeline taking place after 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand, Yashida-san (Hal Yamanouchi) is the head of a vast corporation. He wants to say thanks to his saviour before he dies.
