[9.2/10] *The Wolverine*, the predecessor to *Logan*, focused on the notion of immortality as both a blessing and a curse, showing its protagonist contemplating the release of death as a release from the trauma of the horrors he’d witnessed and participated in. It presented a man on torn by that internal conflict, trying to decide what’s worth living for.
*Logan* both deepens and doubles down that internal conflict. The man we meet in the film, set in the not too distant future of 2029, has no more dilemmas about life versus death. He wants to die, seeming only to stick around to fulfill his responsibilities to Charles Xavier, the last living man to show kindness to him and see the best in him. He is a man ready to detach from the world, who believes that connections and belonging to others only leads to more pain and puts the people he cares about at risk.
Some number of Decades after the events of the prior X-men films (as Deadpool noted, the timeline’s pretty confusing), the dream of Professor X -- of his gifted students as a beacon of light unto the world -- has curdled into a sad reality, where mutants are going extinct and the idea that they could join together and benefit humanity has turned into a select few scrappers and survivors eking out an existence until the clock runs out.
In that, *Logan*’s closest analogue is less other films in the superhero genre, or even Westerns like *Shane* that the movie pays homage to, but *Children of Men*. It shares the same struggle against bleakness, the same worn out world its character inhabit, the same sense that hope for what comes next has dwindled down to nothing. And it shares the premise of one hollowed out man struggling to ferry the possible last hope for his kind, the first new life in a generation, to a sanctuary he may not even believe in.
It’s also a generational story, one that positions Wolverine between Xavier as his surrogate father, battling with a degenerative brain condition and still urging him to embrace the values of altruism and human connection despite the dire straights of their circumstances, and Laura, the equivalent of a daughter who shares Logan’s brusqueness and directness, not to mention his abilities and anger, but who also represents the idea that the next generation (no pun intended, Patrick Stewart) might do better, avoid the mistakes that still haunt Logan and keep him holding onto an adamantium bullet to wipe it all away.
With these weighty themes, *Logan* earns its R-rating regardless of how much blood is shed in its runtime. Nevertheless, it meets its quota of severed limbs and grisly scenes required of a picture freed from the constraints of tentpole PG-13 ratings. And yet, the gore rarely feels gratuitous. Instead, director James Mangold (who also directed *The Wolverine*) allows the audience to feel the brutality of Logan’s slashing and gutting. Instead of the weightless thrillride of most blockbuster action, there’s a visceral quality to Wolverine’s claws separating flesh from bone -- using the expanded palette of the R-rating to convey the horrors that Wolverine is and has been a party to, the vicious realities he’s ready to escape and grown so weary of.
That same sense of a worn down world emerges in the superlative cinematography and production design of the film. The opening portion of the film, set in the southwest, depicts a weathered wasteland amid technological advancements, with a blistering sun beating down on rusted spindles. The middle section gives way to night in the heartland, with darkened hues dancing around bits of light. And the final act of the film is full of naturalistic beauty, full of sumptuously shot forests and verdant landscape. The transition in settings as Wolverine and his coterie make their way to their destination, from barren land to a blooming wilderness helps symbolize Wolverine’s own internal journey from hopelessness to a belief that the chance for renewal is there.
It helps that Mangold brings outstanding performances out of all three of his leads. Stewart is mesmerizing, finding different notes to play in a man who’s remembering the unspeakable acts he’s responsible for, coping with the loss of his mental capacity and the cage that inevitably places him in, and still encourages a belief in a brighter tomorrow. Dafne Keen shines as young Laura, communicating determination and hints of the fire that once burned in her forebear in a mostly-wordless role.
And Hugh Jackman gives a performance worthy of what he’s claimed will be his last time donning the claws. After seventeen years with this character, Jackman’s Wolverine convincingly carries the weight of all that he’s done and seen, dismissive of the greater mission Xavier once again tries to instill in him, grappling with disappointment, in himself and the potential for something greater he once begrudgingly but earnestly bought into, and allowing himself, bit by bit, to consider the possibility that there are things still worth risking your life for, not just worth ending it.
The third act of the film hits some of these notes a little too hard, and gives into more of the standard superhero flick playbook than the prior, transfixing two-thirds of the film. But even there, as the sober atmosphere of the film gives way to some cheese and action, *Logan* keeps its themes at the heart of the film, creating an appropriate culmination to nine films’ worth of development of Wolverine that embraces where the character’s been and connects to where he began.
That is the question *Logan* is most concerned with -- was all of that worth it? While the film takes Wolverine’s past in broad strokes (thankfully largely omitting his misadventures in *Origins*), it takes those prior stories as fodder for the idea that Wolverine has strived and suffered and now finds himself questioning whether it got him, or the people he loved, or anyone for that matter, to anything approaching a better place, or if it all crumbled into nothing anyway.
Mangold, Jackman, and the rest of the film’s creators take the hardship, the piercing, hollowing out qualities of that sort of contemplation seriously, allowing it to weigh down their protagonist and the world he inhabits. But it’s not a film that wallows. Instead, *Logan* pulls no punches with what haunts Wolverine, but offers a chance for the lapsed hero to be redeemed, to see his fight and his existence, the path that Xavier set him on so long ago, leading to a chance for their successors to do more and do better. It is meditative and visceral, dispiriting and hopeful, showing a man ready to die, to cast off all that he was and did, rediscovering the promise, the justifying pull, of a worthwhile future, even one he may never see.
Plex 
Kodi 
Stremio 
Jellyfin 
Netflix 
Disney+ 
Prime Video 
HBO Max 
Trakt 
TMDB 
Letterboxd 
IMDb 
Simkl 
TVTime 
United States
