But this is not the healthy Logan that we know. This Logan walks with a limp, coughs up blood and isn't healing. His claws don't always extend fully and it seems as though his adamantium is killing him. He spends his days either drunk (which previously wasn't really possible for long periods) or acting as a chauffeur with his leased limo. You get the feeling that Logan would disappear into the wilderness all together, except that one thing keeps him going: Charles Xavier, the last member of his family, needs him. Logan drives the limo in order to buy the medicine that Charles needs to stave off seizures. These seizures are eventually going to kill him and everyone caught in Charles's psychic radius. These same seizures -- which immobilizes/paralyzes anyone around him -- caused the death of most of Charles's X-Men the year before. Both men are shadows of their former selves, with Charles battling drug-induced dementia (while locked in the innards of a broken-down smelting plant) and Logan weak and vulnerable.
Their day-to-day drudgery is interrupted by Transigen's Chief of Security, who sports a robotic right arm and wants Logan to find something he's 'lost.' Logan refuses, but he's soon found by the thing that Transigen lost: Laura, a mutant that it genetically engineered from Logan's DNA. Like Logan, she's been infused with adamantium and has his healing powers and wolverine-reflexes. Unlike Logan, she and the other mutants that Transigen engineered have been raised as fighting machines and she kills with skill, efficiency and very little regret.
Despite himself, and because Transigen is threatening Charles, Logan goes on the run with Laura. Slowly, the feral Laura reveals the more-human side of herself and Logan's family grows from a duo to a multi-generational trio. (There's a really nice scene where Laura and Charles watch Shane, just like a girl might do with her grandfather on a Sunday afternoon.)But, like I said, this is not your regular X-Men movie, because the deaths in it are final. Unlike Charles's death in X-Men: The Last Stand, where he explodes into ash and then later resurrects in the body of a brain-dead man, or X-Men: Days of Future Past, where projecting Wolverine into the past saves the lives of many of the future X-men, when characters die in this movie, they stay dead. And it hurts. It made even the men in my group of friends cry (and not just a lone tear escaping down the cheek). When they die, it isn't a peaceful, resolved send-off. It's unexpected and the life ends as it does for most of us: unresolved.
Logan leaves an X-Men sequel a possibility, with a host of new young mutants to grow up into the mutant-saviors of tomorrow. But when it ends, you end up wishing that a little bit more of Bryan Singer's kind of X-Men had made it into the film. And it could have. They laid the seeds that could have gone there, but it didn't. I wonder if going there wouldn't have been such a bad thing. Yes, this movie is supposed to be dark and real, but the ending I can envision could have held onto that without being quite so bleak.Don't get me wrong. What James Mangold has created is a movie worth experiencing and not to be missed. It's worth watching twice to fully digest it. It's Hugh Jackman's final turn as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart's final turn as Professor X. The two knock it out of the park. It just isn't a typical X-Men movie.
My Rating: 9/10
Links:
IMDB page for the movie.Wikipedia page for the movie.
Official website of 20th Century Fox.
Rotten Tomatoes page for the movie.
Collider.com article - The ending of the movie explained (contains spoilers).
Collider.com article - ‘Logan’: 5 Wolverine Films We Need to See Next.
Variety.com article - The Lesson of ‘Logan’: Superhero Sagas Are Better When They’re Real Movies.
Reviews:
Rolling Stone review
Excellent RogerEbert.com review by Matt Zoller Seitz.TheVerge.com review - Logan review: not just the bloodiest X-Men movie, but also the saddest - "The first R-rated Wolverine movie is bleak, uncompromising, and completely mesmerizing"
TheVerge.com article - Logan broke our hearts in many beautiful ways — and one awful one.
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