Logan: The Best There Is At What He Does

Even with occasionally spiraling quality of the parent X-Men movies, there just never seemed to be a way to make a good movie about its flagship character Wolverine. While this could be chalked up to Fox losing faith the series after a few self-inflicted misfires (X-3), it never helped that the first actual trip into the tattered psyche of the character (Origins) still consistently ranks as one of the worst comic book movies ever put to film. And, while they did try to fix this problem with an awesome premise (Wolverine vs. Ninjas!) in The Wolverine a few years later, even that effort came off as too ham-fisted and afraid to explore the character fully. Apparently tired of hearing these complaints over the years and with the added bonus of Deadpool totally proving their business model wrong (R rated movies CAN make money!), Fox has finally decided to give us Logan, the movie Wolverine always deserved but never seemed to get. The result is something very near perfection.

Yes, despite taking 17 years and literally another hero (Deadpool) to convince stupid people of its potential, Logan is an awesome send-off to a worthy character who deserved it a decade sooner. The action is visceral and merciless, Stephen Merchant as Caliban is both a disconcerting comic relief and a genuinely honorable character, Dafne Keen might be the best newcomer of the last few years and does so with little or no dialog and, finally freed of the hang ups of a PG-13 movie, the script is able to weave and honest and believable narrative without neutering it for consumption purposes. This world isn't a happy place for mutants and whole dream of that utopia never came to fruition. Instead, the world just found a way to “deal” with mutants and left the survivors not so much to pick up the pieces but to wallow in the ash of the perfect world Xavier (Stewart) so desperately wanted to create. The final result is a world where mutants aren't so much a vilified race anymore as a decimated and little thought-of population desperately trying to find hope where they are little more than an endangered species no one is really keen on saving. It's a superhero movie where the superheroes are the ones who need rescuing.

Unfortunately, while the movie works so well when it focuses on its own humanity, it ultimately fails on its biggest selling point: the over-the-top violence. While this worked early in the movie as an explanation for just how hard the world has become, it eventually loses its context and falls into nothing but pointless bloodletting over its 135 minute run time. While this violence is still fun to watch, by the third act, it all falls into a tired pattern of Logan (Jackman) running into an army of disposable meat heads and choosing to dice his way through them for little purpose outside of feeling like the producers purchased too much overpriced fake blood. This, compounded by the film's scattershot narrative being given too much time to fester, causes the movie to have multiple narrative problems when it should be wrapping up for the awesome finale. While it still nails the ending by giving the main characters a worthy send off, it still remains a sad footnote that they pretty much had the whole movie in the bag before someone said, “Hey! Let's add one more action scene!”

As for watching it, do you like comic book movies but hate that they seem to neuter their best characters for a more box office-friendly PG-13 rating? This isn't kid-friendly in the slightest. Would you prefer being able to take your kids with you to the theater? Go watch Disney Marvel while the big boys finally get their day in the sun over at Fox. Either way, Marvel gets your money here.

James Mangold (The Wolverine) finally gets the green light to make a proper Wolverine movie with Logan, a dark, poignant superhero movie about a man wanting to die while desperately seeking something to live for. In the far future, mutants are now on the verge of extinction and Logan (Jackman) is an old man slowly dying from sepsis due to his metal bones. When offered a job to get mutant clone Laura (Keen) to a safe haven in Canada, Logan packs up his last friend Charles (Stewart) and the three go on a road trip occasionally punctuated by Laura getting angry and bad guys dying horribly. Basically, its The Road with a slightly more hopeful message and more cyborgs. Check it out.

My score: 8/10. Showtime just released its newest promo for the Twin Peaks reboot. It's a twenty second clip of creator David Lynch eating a glazed doughnut. Never change, man...