Review: Logan
The best stand-alone Wolverine/Logan film, one of the best entries in the X-Men franchise, and one of the best superhero movies ever made, Logan is in many ways the antithesis to the films that have populated both the Marvel and DC film universes. Its pacing is nuanced rather than adrenalised, it is comparatively sparing in its CGI and special effects, reflectiveness has replaced bombast, and its violence impacts rather than numbs. Most significantly, this is a film with a superhero for whom super no longer seems to apply.
Indeed, the first emotional gut punch derives from seeing both Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) as painfully ordinary men. Age has caught up to the once seemingly invincible mutants, who are now holed up in an abandoned plant on the outskirts of El Paso. The Professor is now in his 90s, no longer wholly in control of his powerful brain and needing black market medication to quell the seizures that cause temporary paralysis for those in the vicinity, including his daylight-evading albino caretaker, Caliban, played by Stephen Merchant in a wonderfully droll turn.
Logan himself works as a driver, ferrying drunken frat boys and bridal parties up and down the Las Vegas strip. He's drunk half the time, his eyesight fading, his body besieged by aches and pains, no longer able to heal itself as quickly as it once did. The admantium - the source of his strength - is slowly but surely poisoning him. In short, he is no longer the Wolverine so heralded in the history books and X-Men comic books. He and the Professor may be the last of their kind - the mutants are an endangered species, no mutant births have occurred in the past 25 years - though the Professor, during one of his unmedicated rambles, insists there are mutants to be found.
It isn't too long before the Professor is proven right. Logan is entreated by a Mexican nurse named Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) to protect a young girl named Laura (newcomer Dafne Keen) from paramilitary cyborg Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), who has been tasked by Dr. Rice (Richard E. Grant) to retrieve her. Laura, as it comes to be revealed, is one of the specially bred, genetically enhanced products created within the Transigen corporation who have been specifically trained to be ruthless killing machines. Truly, the initial display of Laura's powers is something to behold - she is feral and unstinting in her aggression and more than a match for the over-muscled soldiers that Pierce deploys her way. More breathtaking, especially for Logan, is the fact that she possesses metallic claws in both her hands and feet and this connection, combined with the Professor's prodding and Laura's intractability, forces him to carry out Gabriela's dying request to take Laura to a place in North Dakota named Eden so that she can be given safe passage to Canada, where she can be sheltered from Transigen's reach.
Helmed and co-written by James Mangold, Logan successfully fuses the superhero and Western genres. The film references Western classics such as Shane ("There's no living with the killing.), Unforgiven, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to reflect upon the emotional and physical toll that violence takes upon those who inflict it and how the printed legend distorts the actual truth. It is a film that confronts mortality - "Everyone I know goes away in the end," acknowledges Johnny Cash in his cover of "Hurt," used to perfection in the film's trailers - which considerably raises the stakes for Logan during the film's fight scenes, all of which are excellently staged and piercingly powerful. (Mangold also introduces a particularly formidable villain whose identity, hinted at in X-Men: Apocalypse, is a literal representation of Logan's ongoing battle with himself.)
It also continues the theme of family and belonging, which has been the foundation and throughline of all the X-Men films. For better or worse, the Professor, Logan and Laura are a family - sometimes forced to tolerate one another, sometimes begrudgingly affectionate - and their scenes together will be all too familiar to anyone who's had to discipline a child or take care of someone who is infirm. One doesn't need to have seen the previous films to be moved by the scenes between the Professor and Logan as they have dinner with a ranch family (Eriq La Salle, Elise Neal, and Quincy Fouse), or be brought to tears when Logan utters the line "It's got water" later in the film.
Stewart is a wonder, imbuing the Professor with a pathos and dignity worthy of King Lear. Yet this is Jackman's show all the way. Jackman has played this character in nine films over the course of 17 years - the role may have made him a star, but Jackman made the character his own. Never once has Jackman phoned it in, though he easily could have. Rather, he has deepened the character - even before this film, Logan was always the most human and interesting of the original X-Men - and it is a testament to Jackman's work that not only has no other actor but him has played the role but that this is, so far, the only X-Man from that initial group to have had his own films and create his own mythology. Logan is a perfect swan song for both the character and for Jackman in the role. It's inevitable that the series will continue with another actor cast in the role, but no one will ever match the ferocity, vulnerability, brusque comedic touch, and poignancy that Jackman brought to the man named Logan and the hero called Wolverine.
Logan
Directed by: James Mangold
Written by: Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook, Richard E. Grant, Stephen Merchant, Eriq LaSalle, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Elise Neal, Quincy Fouse
