K-SCORE: 89
Director: James Mangold
Writers: Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Richard E. Grant
Spoiler Level: Minor
Tired of superhero movies with their world-ending plots involving skybeams, their Stan Lee cameos, their unwillingness to kill off any of their characters, their naive and altruistic female leads, their tragic billionaire male leads, their insistence on keeping you focused on the next more-epic film or franchise that’s coming with teasers, end credit scenes, and the like instead of focusing on making this film decent? I don’t understand why not, but I am, and so was James Mangold evidently when he created Logan. The latest Wolverine-centric X-Men film has an entirely different tone from most superhero narratives, much better characterization, a compelling and personal plot, and gruesome, gritty, action sequences. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s one of the best I’ve seen in quite a while.
The problems with Logan would be more annoying if the film overall wasn’t so fresh. I’ve always liked X-Men better than other Marvel franchises, so to get something like this is particularly thrilling for me. The opening fight scene establishes a burnt-out Wolverine who still has to brawl with douchebags in a future where mutants are all but extinct. When he drives his claws through the brains of his enemies and the film shows the claws sticking out either end, all the gory detail, I knew I was in for something cringy yet exciting. By the time they show an Alzheimer’s-ridden Professor X, a premise masterfully compelling, I was completely onboard. I even found the plot structure somewhat innovative. It’s more of a linear journey than a story that comes full circle. They travel to many different locations with different feels to them and they don’t backtrack. It’s surprisingly rare.
But the real strength of Logan comes from the details and the small choices that they make. Fairly iconic is when they fail to drive straight through a chain-link fence, but my favorite is easily the numerous times Logan loads Professor X into a car and then goes back and grabs his wheelchair and puts that in the trunk or hatchback as well. There are also several really striking shots, in particular the ones when the professor is having one of his episodes. Laura pushing all of the buttons in the elevator is really charming, and there’s a Vasquez Suicide that I can only describe as fucking textbook.
Much as I want to exclusively sing this film’s praises as encouragement for filmmakers to step out of their creative boxes when making them, it has its faults too. All three villain variants leave something to be desired. The metal arm guy is pointless, the mutant-neutering scientist behaves really stupidly the whole film, and X-24 makes the film have three characters all basically with the same combat gimmick. I also almost never enjoy fiction within fiction as utilized in Laura’s X-Men comic books. And the Eden wooded locale with the children is both too like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys and too like other X-Men films with their various conglomerates of unnamed children with assorted an uncreative mutant powers.
Logan’s a high quality movie. I wish James Mangold had gotten his hands on similar scripts and told a Wolverine saga a la Christopher Nolan’s Batman series, but I’m happy with this being introduced to the X-Men canon. I only wish I could forget about Days of Future Past entirely when watching these movies with these same actors playing these same characters. That film sucks so much it drags good ones into the muck along with it.