Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Let's get the hyperbole out right up front. Logan is not only the best X-film to date it's also my current favorite film of 2017, period.
I was expecting the movie to be well made and badass just by virtue of James Mangold's involvement, but I wasn't expecting it to be so emotionally compelling.
Mangold had a few big bullets going into this one, the biggest of which was Hugh Jackman's investment in making this movie as boundary pushing and brutal as possible. He also very smartly used almost two decades worth of audience investment in the character of Wolverine to push this closing chapter to emotional places you absolutely couldn't have done without that time with this particular actor in this particular role .
If this was the launching point for a new actor in the role of Wolverine the movie does not work. If this was the first Wolverine story this movie does not work. The story on display here is one of redemption and hope set against a backdrop of violence and despair. For the positive side of the story to be truly effective you have to have that history, even if it's just knowing that Hugh Jackman has been wearing the claws for almost 20 years.
Don't get me wrong, you don't have to know every X-Men film and spin-off backwards and forwards to get what's going on, but knowing the history, even on a surface level, instantly locks in the deeper themes of this movie.
Logan is a beaten man. The fight is over. The mutants lost. The world has moved on. Logan has left The Wolverine behind and all he wants to do is hide out, save up enough money to take him and a dementia-suffering elderly Professor Xavier away from it all and go live out the rest of their days on a boat. That's not just because he wants away from humanity, he also wants to protect them from Xavier's blisteringly deadly psychic convulsions and the trail of death that follows Wolverine himself wherever he goes.
He's both selfish and selfless at the same time and that duality is all throughout the movie, giving a much welcome complexity to the world of superhero cinema without getting bogged down in the weeds of multi-film arc storytelling.
Much of this film is Logan fighting himself; his past, his instincts, his influence, his conscience, his legend and his legacy and it does so without making him a chore to watch. Hugh Jackman is so invested in this character and telling this story this exact way that watching his journey is exciting on a level far above what some world-killing machine using, mustache-twirling bad guy could ever make it.
Jackman always brings it in this role, but here he has the material to give an awards-quality performance, aided hugely by a fantastic supporting cast and a thrilling script that pulls no emotional punches.
You've got Patrick Stewart playing Professor X in a way he's never gotten to before. He's always had a dangerous power, but his personality, inherent goodness and strict control always meant it was in check. Now he's 90 years old and while his mind is still as powerful as it has ever been, he's losing control of it, which makes him the most sympathetic WMD that ever was.
Boyd Holbrook is a great front and center bad guy, playing a part cyborg soldier named Pierce. He's cocky, confident, mean to the core, but also having a good time. He's a Wolverine fan, too, which adds another layer to their contentious conversations. This role really put Holbrook on the map for me and makes me super psyched to see him face off against Shane Black's Predator.
Stephen Merchant also gets a chance to shine as Caliban, a mutant on his own path of redemption. He took part in a great mutant cleansing using his power to track other mutants before the events of our story, but now cares for Professor X when Logan is away. Merchant is mostly known for his comedic roles and Caliban does have a nice bit of nagging wife style bickering with Logan, but on the whole he's a super empathetic character. It's nice to see Merchant given the chance to play with something different.
Eriq La Salle, Elise Neal and Quincy Fouse also play an important role in the second act of the movie as a family that Logan comes across. They show him and his group what real happiness can be and there's such an incredibly ballsy storytelling choice involving this section of the movie that I'm still shocked it got through the studio system.
Each member of the supporting cast would be the MVP in any other film, but everybody here happened to be in the same movie as Dafne Keen. She plays the mysterious Laura, a young girl dumped into Wolverine's life. The character is the emotional core of the movie and Keen turns in a multilayered performance that is all the more impressive when you consider that it came from a child actor.
If you've seen the trailer you know she's not a normal little girl. If you know the comics you know why she's not a normal little girl. To avoid plot spoilers I won't go too far into that, but what I will say is that Keen had to play her character in a few different ways and knocks each and every one out of the park. She handles the action with all the ferocious aplomb that her character requires, she handles the silent character work perfectly, expressing everything that needs to be said body language, and when she finally does speak her line delivery never felt kid actor-y.
Laura's connection to Logan is perfect and both actors work so well together that I kind of wish we'd get 10 movies about this pairing.
Another thing that sets Logan apart from other superhero movies is the rating. We've had Deadpool and Blade, but an R-rated superhero movie is still a bit of a fresh concept, especially with a character as big as Wolverine. Mangold, Scott Frank and Michael Green don't just use the rating as a way to throw in a bunch of f-bombs, they also use it as a character. The uber-violence in the movie hits two very important points.
One, it scratches the itch that hardcore Wolverine fans have wanted to see onscreen since the very first X-Men movie and two, it underscores one of the core concepts of the movie, a lesson Logan wants to pass on to Laura. The violence is graphic, deadly and, of course, a little fun, but it has some awful consequences. Even when killing is unavoidable it's still going to have extremely negative repercussions. The violence is key to Laura's arc in the movie.
It doesn't take a dyed in the wool cinephile to see the parallels between Logan and a good western. In fact one very famous western is watched by the main characters at one point and if you know what that movie is you'll know how the second half of the movie is going to play out. The message of that movie is very much applicable to this one and so is the tone.
Mangold shoots Logan in a way that should remind you of a great western as well. Most of it is a road picture with our heroes on the run from the bad guys, which takes us through territory we haven't seen in movies like this as well as adding an urgency to their quest.
Is this movie perfect? Nope, but very few are. I think Richard E. Grant's bad guy, Dr. Rice, is a bit one-note and there's a sequence where we're watching sneakily captured spy video that seems to forget it's supposed to be secretly shot about halfway through it and the camera would obviously be seen by anybody in the room. There are little things like that that don't add up, but they don't even come close to derailing the emotional core of the story that succeeds on every level.
I left the theater buzzing about this movie and I can't wait to go again. If this is indeed our last Hugh Jackman Wolverine movie then he's going out on a crazy high note.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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