The first word uttered—growled, really—in Logan is “fuck,” an immediate announcement that this ain’t your granddaddy’s Wolverine movie. Director James Mangold, who wrote the Logan script with Michael Green and Scott Frank, intends to serve us up something different, a hard-R superhero slugfest that pulls no punches. Which is a concept both exciting and exhausting, as the constant, seemingly never-ending battle between lighter superhero fare and moody vigilantism has done perhaps mortal damage to both sides of the debate.
To my mind, anyway. There’s little beyond a new Adam Sandler project that is a more tiring proposition than another superhero movie. The deluge of Marvel and DC films has made us desperate to individuate them, each little stylistic flourish greeted as a hallmark change, a bold invention, a reimagining of the genre. (Think of all the overblown panting about The Winter Soldier being a 70s conspiracy thriller, when in reality it was just another pretty good Marvel movie in the same mold as the rest.) At this point, the only thing anyone could do to really shock the superhero system would be to make every character non-white, female, or gay—or all three! (Someone do that, please.) Or, they could take a beloved character who’s always been a little dark, a PG-13 version of dark, and remove the electric fence that’s been hemming him in. Which is essentially what Logan (opening March 3) does, pushing Hugh Jackman’s weary Wolverine to his limits, exposing the pure violence of the character and, in some ways, curing our addiction to him.
Logan is really violent. Because, well, Wolverine is violent. His chief weapons are six razor-sharp claws that can eviscerate and de-limb people with one swipe. But in the previous X-Men films—this is Jackman’s ninth film appearance as Logan/Wolverine—we’ve only gotten intimations of that carnage. Wolverine has been presented as tough and dangerous, but never as a straight-up murderer. Logan undoes all that, making its bold statement of purpose in the very first scene. We see Logan impale and literally unarm, a sight as shocking and gruesomely thrilling as when we hear Logan—and later, another venerable X-Men character—drop that f-bomb. (He continues to do that, profusely, throughout.) There are points when Logan may be a bit too enamored of its hardboiled edge, pushing things a bit too far. But for the most part, Mangold’s film is pitched at just the right tone—bracing and enveloping, a crunching chase movie that has the heft of true conviction.
The film takes place in the not-so-distant future, in the year 2029. There are vague allusions to past catastrophe and upheaval involving the purging of mutants, and there are automated big-rig trucks on the highway. But the most glaring sign that time has passed is Logan himself, whose beard has gone gray, who walks with a limp, and whose constant cough suggests there may indeed be some mortality lurking beneath that quick-healing skin and adamantium skeleton. Jackman still looks remarkably the same as he did when he first played this character 17 years ago (good Lord), but yes, there is some new grizzle there. It’s jarring to see our hero so ailing, with a flicker of finality in his eyes, but there’s something comfortingly honest about it, too. The X-Men films have often fudged time—seemingly ageless characters floating through the decades, timelines in the past that don’t really sync up with those in the present—so the acknowledgement that these people are subject to at least some laws of the physical world is grounding. It makes the fantastical stuff more credible, somehow.
I’m sorry to say there’s another X-Men character experiencing similar ravages. Patrick Stewart returns to play the team’s once-fearless leader, Charles Xavier, now an addled old man babbling away about nothing. It’s a sad sight, but Stewart gives all that doddering a certain dignity. He and Jackman have built a prickly bond for their characters over the years, and Logan evokes that history to unexpectedly moving effect. This is still a rather bleak, unforgiving film, but there are moments throughout Logan when Mangold and his actors manage something verging on sentiment—of the stoic, manly variety, anyway.
Interrupting that manliness is a little girl, a quiet, serious creature named Laura who, through a series of violent circumstances, comes under Logan’s care. She’s being pursued by Boyd Holbrook’s drawling, robot-handed mercenary—named Donald, heh—and while Logan certainly helps Laura elude him, she is not the defenseless child prop of so many other “gruff man learns to love” action movies. She’s got claws of her own, a fact we’re first made aware of just after she’s decapitated a henchman. Together, Logan, Charles, and Laura (played by the terrific, expressive newcomer Dafne Keen) set off on a desperate road trip, trying to deliver Laura to safety while Logan and Charles grapple with ghosts and the onslaught of the inevitable. Mangold builds Logan with the rest-fight-rest-fight structure so familiar to the chase genre, which could easily be rote and repetitive. But Mangold finds ways to tweak the form, to unsettle us with surprise just when we’ve decided what a scene is going to be.
Unlike most other X-Men films, Logan does not employ any big special effects beyond an explosion or two. It’s a low-to-the-ground, intimate kind of action movie, allowing for many gnarly close-ups of metal going through throats and skulls and other stuff. And unlike most superhero movies of late, Logan doesn’t engineer its plot for franchise road-mapping. There may be a larger mythology forming around the film’s edges, but Logan stays lean and loose—a freedom that allows Mangold to take the characters to startling extremes. The movie earns its grim tone by not shying away from its implications. In clarifying just who Logan is and what he can do—and has done for 17 years, just offscreen—he becomes demystified, demythologized. Jackman has said that this is his last time sporting the muttonchops, and Logan does indeed feel like a good-bye. We’re shown Wolverine in his rawest, truest form—and there is nowhere to go from there. Mangold gives our grumpy old friend quite a send-off, a blood-drenched stab-a-thon that frequently hits bone.
