Posted in: Movies | Tagged: film, logan, marvel, movie, reivew, wolverine

Bill Reviews 'Logan': Finally A Wolverine Movie That Lives Up To It's Potential

Well shoot, there goes my streak of being able to lambast 20th Century Fox and Hugh Jackman with impunity over his seventeen year run of near-exclusively terrible films. Logan is [almost] good enough to allow you to put everything that came before it out of your head. In comparing it to other best-in-class genre films, Logan wouldn't be at all out of place. I'm so jazzed over this film that I would argue that both Logan and Deadpool are equally far on the good axis of the scale from their precursor, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, although they got there by going in very different directions.

The film is set in the post-Trump future of 2029 with a dusty and run-down world. The mutant heroes are more myth now than legend, with actual X-Men comics existing in-universe offering up fantastical variants of actual events. In this future, Logan is old, bitter, and broken. Working as a limousine driver, he drinks to forget. His healing factor still works, but only barely. In the opening scene some street thugs are stripping his limo while it's parked on a lonely highway shoulder when he awakens and does what the Wolverine always has. He gets injured, but we see that now the wounds barely stitch together, leaving a patchwork of scars. His claws no longer extend fully – he has to pull them out by force, with blood and puss oozing all the way. When he kills the thugs – it's the kind of not pretty that we'd always hoped to see, claws ripping out throats and through foreheads with bone and blood galore.

What little money Logan does make and doesn't drink away, he uses to keep a small derelict farm going where Professor Xavier lies in a bed, barely able to know who is around him, let alone to use his powers. Patrick Stewart is an amazing performer as always, but watching him as a tortured Alzheimer's sufferer is not easy. Something seems to have happened in the past to cause all of the other X-Men to no longer be around and whatever it was continues to haunt both Logan and Xavier.

No newly discovered mutants have been found in over 20 years, causing Logan to wonder if they hadn't been an evolution, but rather just a mistake. The dark vibe and loss of hope draws heavily on the 2006 classic, Children of Men. Into the midst of their self-imposed sunset, when a desperate women appears, offering a large sum of money for Logan to take a young girl, Laura (Dafne Keen) to an area of safety in North Dakota. He initially refuses, done with the world and its troubles, but as he realizes that she's another mutant his hand is forced as government paramilitary troops descend to take he girl by force.

Laura turns out to be every bit as fierce as Wolverine, and more than just in aggression. It turns out that she's a mini-version of Logan himself, complete with adamantium claws, speed, and super-healing. Her ability to turn her opponents into so much hamburger would do even the hard to impress Hit Girl proud.

The film isn't so much of a traditional superhero arc as a father/daughter type of story where the estranged father and wayward daughter come to a truce to go on an adventure. But this is also a modern variant, there's no super-flowery endings with everyone happy. This is a future storyline, so writer and director James Mangold is using that to full effect; he doesn't need to play it safe. Characters can be injured, even mortally. Who he might choose to let live or die, and who succeeds and fails, can be based on the needs of this particular story, and not obliging to an episodic loop where the world needs to be back at its initial state for the next installment.

Stewart is channeling his very best James McAvoy impersonation, really blending the best of both of the Xavier incarnations from across the franchise (in those few times when he's lucid enough to remember himself).

Not everyone will likely be happy with this film, as it is a huge delta from the typical Fox approach to the X-Films (Deadpool notwithstanding). It really is to the superhero genre, what a one-shot graphic novel is to comics. I will entirely admit, I grew up an X-Men fan, and my feelings on the series thus far have ranged from disappointment to abject loathing, with the singular exception being First Class (which I loved). When Jackman announced back at San Diego Comic Con a few years ago that he would no longer be playing Wolverine again, I was relieved. Then of course he'd gone on to do it twice more, but this second time, I will stand up and admit that I am genuinely glad he did it.

Now if they would only give the rest of the team a suitably strong film, but that might be asking too much.

Director: James Mangold

Writers: Scott Frank, James Mangold,Michael Green, David James Kelly, Craig Kyle, John Romita Sr., Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe, Len Wein, Christopher Yost

Stars: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart,Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant

Rating: R

Running Time: 2h 17m

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