Review: Logan

Do you like sadness? Do you like violence? Do you like father/daughter bonding while committing violence? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, you’re going to love Logan. The third and final solo Wolverine movie, following The Wolverine, and started with the all around terrible X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Logan ends Hugh Jackman’s 17 year run playing the titular character. As always, I’ll warn you before I get into spoilers.

Logan is based on the premise that Hugh Jackman is getting old, and these movies kick his ass. He’s at least cameoed in 9 of the X-Men movies, and now he wants to focus on more important films.

Logan takes place in the not so distant future, which I think is a different future than the one in Days of Future Past. Almost all of the mutants are dead, but due to his healing factor he’s still here. He’d tired. He’s like 300 years old. He’s been fighting all of his life. He just wants to relax. Soon a young girl enters his life and he has to protect her. Chaos ensues.

This is a super dark movie. I heard that they had thought of releasing it in black and white. This is a story that relies on characters rather than fancy effects. You could take the superpowers part out, and while the plot would fall apart, it would still kind of work as a movie.

Do NOT take your children to see this movie.

Spoilers ahead:

Wow, this is a violent movie. After Deadpool’s amazing success as an R rated superhero movie, Logan was given the green light for being R rated. Wolverine, as a character, has always been hot headed and violent, but you can’t really sell a violent superhero movie to parents. This time, they just said “fuck it, this is for the fans.”  That makes sense, because that is what Deadpool did so well. They didn’t care about critics or soccer moms. They are both movies for the fans. This one in particular, is sort of an ode to Wolverine.

It’s not just Wolverine who’s violent. X23, his clone? daughter? has basically the same abilities he has, but with even less control. She’s ready to cut a dude because he wants her to pay for the stuff she takes. Prick had it coming, I guess.

So anyway, Logan has to get…

Side rant: I know that they didn’t plan on making a trilogy, but I really think the names for the three Wolverine movies are wrong. The first one should have been named “Logan”, and of course, completely rewritten. The second one can stay “The Wolverine”, and this one should be called “Berserker”, after his famous move where he slashes and cuts everything. Because this movie actually shows it. It’s kind of how I have a problem with the Dark Knight Trilogy names. The first one should have been “The Dark Knight Begins”, so it matches the rest.

Anyway, Logan has retired from saving the world, and is now a limo driver. Even when he gets to see tits, he’s kind of burned out. Logan has been fighting for hundreds of years, and he’s just done. Meanwhile, Professor X has become senile, and prone to seizures. Oh. And major spoiler, he killed all of the X-Men. Yeah. Seriously. Logan has been caring for Professor X, with the help of Wheatley from Portal 2, whose superpower is “smelling mutants”.

They keep Professor X heavily doped up, down in Mexico, so that he doesn’t have another seizure and kill more people. Logan is the only one who can get to Professor X in time in case he has another seizure, due to his rapid healing. Sadly, the adamantium in his body is slowly killing him. Still not sure how this works. Maybe his healing factor has been protecting him from it for so long, that now he’s not healing as quickly?

So Logan has to get this little girl to a safe zone, and there are all these bad guys after her. Wolverine doesn’t want to, but does it anyway, and they find out that she’s “a lot like” him. Sure, she has claws, and can heal instantly, but that also includes her rage. Logan seems well composed compared to her. There is a ton of death in this movie. Between X23’s uncontrollable rage kills and Logan’s protect the girl rage kills, lots of bad guys die.

There were a few things that didn’t make sense to me. First, in Origins, someone tries to kill Logan with an adamantium bullet, because it’s the only thing that could penetrate his skull. Instead, it just gives him amnesia. In this movie, they use the same type of bullet to kill the Logan clone. Oh yeah. Old man Logan fights a young clone of himself. In any case, the rules don’t make sense. In Origins, it just ruins his makeup. In this movie, it causes a dude’s head to ‘splode.

Second problem is the scene with the automated trucks. This is supposed to be the future, but there’s not a whole lot of futurism in it. There’s one scene where automated trucks accidentally run everyone off the road. I don’t know why they had this scene, other than to introduce that farm family. It was kind of out of nowhere, and kind of useless.

Third, I can’t remember if it’s expressly stated, or just hinted at, but corporations were using corn syrup to prevent anyone with the mutant gene from being born. That’s why there weren’t any new mutants, and why the evil scientists had to resort to cloning. It’s an interesting dystopia type of thing, but the idea that there’s one gene that can make one person fly, and another person invisible, and another person walk through walls, always bothered me.

Overall, this is a story of finding redemption at the end of your life. Logan and Charles have been through a lot, and have made plenty of mistakes, and done flat out bad things, but maybe if they save this one little girl, they can die in peace. It relies on storytelling and character development, rather than shiny special effects, and definitely stands apart from the other X-Men movies. From tone, to plot, this is in the X-Men universe, with X-Men characters, but doesn’t really feel like an X-Men movie. There’s practically no comedy. This movie is almost completely devoid of happiness, so when you finally do get a sense of pleasure, it’s just because the bar has been set so low. This isn’t a “yay the heroes saved the day” movie, this is a “hey, let’s kick the audience in the heart” movie.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars, because it’s really good.