Logan: Movie Review (Minor Spoilers)

Note: “minor spoilers” includes things such as basic plot details, discussion of reveals in trailers and public media, and basic contextual knowledge, that is to say, stuff we’ve seen in the comics/books/whatever. Read at your own risk.

This turned out to be much better than I expected.

I wasn’t hyped for Logan like a lot of other people were. Call me a cynic but just because a movie has things I like (Pichard is back as Prof. X, it has an R rating, X-23 looks badass) it doesn’t mean I am automatically on board, especially when it comes to the X-Men franchise. I’ve been burned too many times to have my hype for Logan be anywhere above lukewarm. It turns out I was wrong this time.

Logan is the final movie in the X-Men franchise to have Hugh Jackman play Logan aka The Wolverine, the tough, no-nonsense badass with huge iron claws and a short temper. After the whirlwind of mediocre/bad movies in the X-Men franchise, Logan is set up to be much different. Logan takes place in 2029, where the future is basically the same as it is now, except Logan (who I will now refer to as Wolverine to avoid confusion) is much older and not doing so well. Wolverine spends his days drinking and hating life until old Prof. X contacts a brand new mutant. This mutant turns out to be a young girl with similar abilities to Wolverine. Prof. X convinces Wolverine to try and save this young girl from the men pursuing her and the trio make a run for Canada to escape.

Logan may just end up being my favorite movie of the year. It’s hard to put into words just how blown away I was by this movie. In the context of the comic book movie as a whole it’s downright infuriating that this movie wasn’t made sooner, but I’ll get to all that in a second. The cold truth as to why Logan is so good comes in the form of tone. Logan is a bleak, depressing, and sad superhero movie, a movie that does many of the things DC’s ultra dark, brooding cinematic universe has been failing at for years, but does them all so right that the result is a genuinely entertaining and emotional drama centered around the dude with claws and a senile psychic.

How dark and depressing is it? Well, it’s a movie about Wolverine being lonely and sad. Wolverine has aged considerably (his character was actually born in the 1880s, but with his healing abilities is practically immortal), and in this future settings, mutants as we know them are extinct. The X-Men are gone, there is no chance of Wolverine gaining any kind of redemption or heroic duty, he’s just alone with himself until he passes away. That’s some downright heavy shit, but where it all works is both in the performance of Hugh Wolverine and the script being down to earth enough to push away the comic book-y craziness and just let his character breathe. Hugh Jackman does a fantastic job of being the grumpy old alcoholic Wolverine, while still coming off as a man who is aware of all the horrible decisions he has made that his condition and resulting character is not only tolerable, but is damn near justifiable. Yes, Logan is a fantastic X-Men movie because it ignores almost everything that everyone loves about X-Men.

And honestly that’s the number 1 reason to see this movie: the dramatic shift in tone from everything that Disney’s MCU is currently up to, what the X-Men franchise has been doing for years, and the fluster cuck that is the DC cinematic universe. All the pieces in this film just fit together and click. Patrick Stewart once again comes through as the best Prof. X we’ve got, Dafne Keen as X-23 is easily the most badass little girl/child actress I’ve seen in years, and of course the R rating means that those claw fights will be as brutal as they should have been for the last decade or so. The only thing worth complaining about is the lackluster villain. He’s certainly not the star of the series, and comes off as one dimensional and bland as many of the MCU villains. I’m sitting here now and struggling to even remember his name. He serves his purpose on screen, and that’s about it. The other thing that chaps my ass about Logan is how it took us 17 years to get to this point. It’s pointless to complain about it now, but Wolverine and Logan as a character should have been treated with this level of care and respect since the first X-Men movie all the way back in 2000. Let’s hope that other X-Men characters get this level of care (looking at you Storm), and that X-23 is taken care of properly in the future. Seriously, I would 100% be OK with Dafne Keen playing X-23 again in a solo movie and I’d be ecstatic.

Logan isn’t just a fantastic send off to a beloved character, it’s a fantastic movie filled with the dry, bleak atmosphere of the character himself, coupled with the few moments of happiness that made us just as joyful as they made him.

10/10