Wolverine is a man characterised by violence, both violence done to him and violence he does unto others. While Fox’s X-Men film universe has largely cast Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine as the surly, grimacing leading man in what is ostensibly more of a sci-fi flavoured action series at this point rather than superhero films, James Mangold’s Logan seeks to dig in and explore the man behind the violence.
Being Hugh Jackman’s final film as everyone’s favourite clawed Canuck, Logan is the final attempt for Jackman to leave a lasting impression on the character that won’t be marred by black leather jumpsuits, BarakaPool or whatever was happening to his arms in The Wolverine and Days Of Future Past.
Seriously, I hope he got those veins checked out.
Set in yet another post-apocalyptic X-Men future Logan finds an older, even more world weary Logan working a dead end day job while hiding an even more elderly Charles Xavier whose mind has begun deteriorating with severe consequences. That is, until Logan is thrust into a plot that sees him protecting a young girl who is, as you probably already know, very much like him.
To go any further would do serious disservice to how the story, written by Mangold with Scott Frank and Michael Green, plays out as a masterwork of slow burning character drama drawing some amazing performances from the storied veterans like Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart and putting Dafne Keen on the map in a huge way.
Logan is, more than anything else, a tone piece. Jackman and Mangold have meticulously created the worst possible future for the X-Men films in order to leave Logan at his most desperate and most self-hating. This is a Logan who has yet again seen everything he ever loved stolen from him. Jackman is almost unrecognisable from his prior incarnations of Logan, covered in barely healed scars and trying earnestly to drown himself in alcohol in damn near every scene.
Bear in mind, this is not a pleasant movie to watch. This is not a “Yeah! Wolverine’s so cool, let’s go watch him slice up bad guys!” movie. This is a meditation on a character defined by violence and examines the toll that can take on one’s body and one’s soul.
If you’ve seen The Wolverine, you will be very familiar with the themes and ideas at work in Logan. In a lot of ways, Logan feels like an attempt by Mangold and Jackman to do over what went wrong with The Wolverine and even in the other X-Men films in attempt to get it right just in time for Jackson to bow out.
Mangold even returns to the idea of removing Logan’s healing factor from the equation in order to inject another layer of vulnerability. This mostly works and the idea that Logan is so old that his healing factor is slowing down and thus rejecting the adamantium lacing his skeleton is much easier to swallow than the idea that an intricate part of his genetic can just be switched off. However, that does leave the film with little more to say than what has been said before.
Where Logan works is in it’s structure and it’s pacing and the performances. As a film, it is a meticulously well made piece that puts the onus on the performances of the actors and let’s the story support those performances. It allows a mix of drama, comedy and brutal action to take these characters on one last ride into the sunset, giving them one last opportunity to shine. The story beats are familiar and well trod ground with one major plot reveal at the end being basically a redo of one from a pior film. However, it’s in the action scenes that Logan truly stands on its own.
The R rating allows the film the opportunity to showcase the brutal violence in unflinching detail, exploring the wake of bodies Logan can and will leave behind him when he is forced to protect someone. From the very first scene, this film use violence as a statement. It uses it to explore and examine the life and legacy of a man whose only contribution to the world has been removing people from it and the toll that leaves on him.
Continued belowIt’s often gut-wrenching in how little the camera flinches in showing men’s heads and arms being impaled and sliced apart. It is, surprisingly, not violence for the sake of violence. It has a point, even if it mostly uses the violence to catapult Logan into the next scene of him drinking heavily and feeling sorry himself which makes up a lot of this movie.
While this movie may be hailed for being Jackman’s last ride as Logan and being the film that finally let Jackman act instead of gruffly shouting at everyone around him (though, there’s still plenty of that), this is really Dafne Keen’s movie. Her turn as Laura steals the show and she acts circles around both Jackman and Stewart despite being saddled with role limitations that would prove difficult for even those two veterans. Having to rely on conveying complicated and varying emotions through facial expressions alone for most of the movie, Keen is a revelation. She carries the weight of the film on her shoulders, bringing a level of character acting and stunt work that almost puts Jackman to shame.
If there’s any major disappointment to the movie, it’s in the antagonists working against the three. Richard E. Grant and Boyd Holbrook both put in serviceable effort as Dr. Zander Rice and Donald Pierce, but their presence in the film is born more out of necessity than passion. The film needs an antagonist and so they show up every so often of menace Logan and co. until they move and the film returns to their more personal problems which it clearly finds much more interesting.
All in all, Logan is still a good movie. It is also a movie you’ve seen before, just done better. If you’ve seen any of the X-Men films in the past, you pretty much know what to expect from this movie when it’s not doing it’s best Drive impression. Still, it’s got character defining turns by Jackman, Stewart and Keen that will be hard to top, a poignant statement on the toll of necessary violence and some kickass action to go along with it. It is, at the end of the day, a good movie that you should probably watch.
Okay, but here’s the rub: Logan is also the most self-hating comic book movie I have ever watched. Despite running through the motions of every X-Men movie before it, borrowing liberally from both The Wolverine and even X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Logan wants you to forget the humble four colour origins of it’s central character.
And it does so by drawing attention to them at every turn. Just as Logan‘s use of violence is a poignant exploration of the weight of a man’s soul, it’s used to try and prove a point that this is a “real movie” instead of one of those flashy, meaningless “comic book movies” that are all the rage.
In one of the most immersion breaking attempts at a meta-narrative I’ve seen in a long time, the film repeatedly has Hugh Jackman hold up some X-Men comics (that were created specifically for the movie by actual comic creators Joe Quesada and Dan Panosian) and yell about how unrealistic they are and how much harsher and violent the “real world” is. This smacks of the same overcompensating “Wham! Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” mentality that has plagued superhero comics for decades now.
It really undermines the hard work put into making a film that attempts to honour the legacy of a character that basically built Hugh Jackman’s career by having him yell at a little girl about how much better his movies are than her shitty comics. It speaks to the deep shame the film feels over having to admit that Logan is more well known for wearing yellow and blue spandex all the while borrowing liberally from those very same comics in order to construct its story.
You will hear claims that Logan transcends comic books and those claims will be from people who don’t understand comic books. Logan is as a comic book-y as it gets, it just fucking hates itself for it.
Continued belowThis is a movie that never needs to be made again. In this industry, anything with a modicum of success and originality will be copied over and over until we’re sick and tired of the very thing that felt fresh in the first place.
Not only is Logan the perfect send off to Jackman and Stewart as Wolverine and Xavier, it’s a perfect encapsulation of the problems that have been plaguing Fox’s X-Men ouvre since it’s inception in 2000. The world doesn’t need another 10 years of studios making pale imitations.
If there were ever a perfect time to close the book on this series, it’s now.
