The Wolverine has everything a summer blockbuster needs to have: Epic battles! Cool effects! Menacing villains! Triumphant (despite flaws) heroes! Asian characters! Robots! 3-D!

Bonus points to The Wolverine for also having arrow-wielding Ninja warriors!

The Wolverine has a relatively complex plot involving a Japanese family’s internal rivalries. Logan, the Wolverine himself (Hugh Jackman, in a non-singing role), meanwhile, is fraught with haunting memories of past horrors and of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), fellow mutant and former squeeze.

The film opens with the Nagasaki A-bomb explosion in 1945. As the bomb’s fireball approaches, prisoner Logan takes Japanese soldier Yashida into the hole where he has been confined. In so doing, he saves the soldier’s life.

Decades later, as Yashida, now a wealthy industrialist, lies on his deathbed, he summons Logan to Tokyo to thank him for saving his life. (The elder Yashida is played by Hal Yamanouchi.) Logan is delivered there by Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a feisty woman with unnaturally bright red hair, who seems to pop up at opportune times throughout the movie.

Yashida has willed his empire not to his son but to his granddaughter Makiro (Tao Okamoto). Yashida asks Logan to protect Makiro from her father and his henchmen.

Among Yashida’s employees is another mutant, Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) whose intentions are not always clear. Hers is not the only character whose motives and allegiances seem to shift during the course of the movie.

The Wolverine has one of its epic battles atop a bullet train. Train top face-offs are nothing new, but this one is memorable, in part because of the train’s apparent high speed.

The ultimate epic showdown happens within a multi-story mountainside lair, where a shiny metal creature jumps into the fray. Is it a robot or is this a spectacular suit of knightly armor?

The Wolverine meets all the requirements listed above. It features (according to many) the most popular of the X-Men. Hugh Jackman is excellent in the role, as usual.

But the movie has some pacing issues. It gets a bit bogged down in the middle, only to provide an awesome payoff with first, the Ninjas, and then, the finale. In a summer full of action blockbusters, The Wolverine ranks near the top of the heap.