Jackman slices and dices one last time as Wolverine

Los Angeles : After eight movies over 17 years, Hugh Jackman returns this weekend for his final hurrah as Wolverine in "Logan," an edgier, darker take on everyone's favorite hairy, metal-clawed mutant anti-hero.

Jackman, 48, had agreed with director James Mangold that if he was going to reprise his iconic role as the cigar-chomping loner one lasttime, it should be the first R-rated outing in the "X-Men" franchise aimed at a more adult audience. 

"Hugh and I didn't want to do it if we couldn't do something very different," Mangold said at a preview in Los Angeles of Twentieth Century Fox's 2017 slate.

"We both felt like we had made the last movie and we also felt like... there's a slew of comic book themed films, superhero movies -- whatever you want to call them -- and I, for one, am feeling kind of an exhaustion watching them, generally."

"Logan," which takes place more than 50 years after the events of "X-Men: Days of Future Past" (2014), sees Wolverine/Logan aging, weary and vulnerable. 

Sporting an unkempt gray beard, he drinks his days away on the Mexican border, picking up black market drugs to treat the dying Professor X, played for a seventh -- and also final -- time by acclaimed British thespian Patrick Stewart.