Logan (2017) Review

No Spoilers

The Die Cast team went to the cinema last night to see the new Wolverine movie "Logan", which is the last outing of Hugh Jackman as the legendary, indestructible, adamantium clad X-Man.

From the outset is was clear that this was a very different type of movie to what we have been used to with the X-Men franchise and also with the Wolverine movies that spin off form it.

First off I would like to point out that this movie is NOT suitable for kids. It is rated 15 at the cinema but I couldn't help but think that maybe the director was shooting for a cert.18 movie. It contains a lot of swearing, is graphically violent and also has one completely unnecessary boob flashing scene.

Given the unlikely success of the Deadpool movie last year it isn't surprising that writers, directors and studios are taking note that there is a strong audience base for R-rated / Cert. 18 superhero movies. Lets face it, a superhero movie has to involve a degree of kicking ass otherwise what makes them superheroes? If we wanted diplomacy from our films then we'd go and see something else. Superhero movies are about bad guys getting their asses handed to them by the good guys and good triumphing over evil, usually at great personal cost to the protagonist. You can't kick a bad guys ass without breaking a few bones.

Whilst Logan has never been shy of busting out the claws and going to town on bad guys this latest film brings a level of graphic violence that had me wincing and squirming with every blow. We see him cutting off limbs, driving his claws through people skulls and partially decapitating bad guys, cutting their heads in half both on the horizontal and vertical axes. From a personal perspective...I LOVED IT!

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

The movie is set in the near future (2029 if I heard it right). Professor Xavier is 94 years old and is suffering with a degenerative brain disorder. Exactly what this is (Alzheimers was mentioned) we are never fully told, but the problem of the most powerful mutant mind in the world having a brain disorder is serious and is referenced a fair bit in the movie. When Charles has seizures his telepathic abilities effect everyone within a large radius causing paralysis and even death. To keep this under control Logan is working every hour he can as a limo driver round the area of the Mexican border and doing deals with employees at local hospitals in order to buy drugs to keep the Charles' seizures from happening.

Logan too has grown old. So much older than we are used to seeing him. His body is battle scared from years of extensive fights. This may seem odd for a person that can self heal almost immediately but as we find out during the movie he is suffering with adamantium poisoning. The rare and indestructible metal that was put in his body almost 60 years ago has been slowly poisoning him and effecting his powers of healing and regeneration. Now, in 2029 his body is slow to heal and his health is clearly failing. He has a pronounced limp, a bad cough and needs glasses to read. His hair is grey and he looks terrible.

As a fan of the franchise I found it very hard to see beloved characters such as Charles Xavier and Logan in such a poor state of health. This is not something that improves during the course of the movie. Professor X loses the plot a couple of times during the film and then has a heartbreaking moment of lucidity, remembering one of his early seizures where he accidentally killed a number of innocent people. This all occurs moments before his is brutally killed at the hands of weapon X24, an artificially grown mutant made from scratch using a sample of Logan's DNA. X24 looks like the young and strong version of Wolverine that we are used to seeing in X-Men moves.

The plot of the film revolves around a little girl called Laura. A mutant created via artificial insemination by the same doctor that created X24. Laura is also made using Logan's DNA but she is a female child, effectively she is Logan's daughter. Like Logan, she has been enhanced, adamantium claws have been surgically grafted into her hands and her feet, but we are unaware as to exactly how much adamantium has been placed into her body. Whether she has a full skeleton of adamantium or not is left unanswered, but we would presume not as this would prevent her body from growing in a normal way. Laura is trying to get to a placed called "Eden", a fabled safe haven for mutants, who are all but extinct in this future timeline. And so it falls to the reluctant Logan and the over zealous Charles to get her there.

The pace of the film can seem quite slow at times with the script ad the score letting it down in places. For example, when Logan is burying Charles in a grave he dug in a copse of trees by a lake he is trying to give a small eulogy for Charles but is choked on his own words, overrun with grief. I felt that Charles deserved more than the film delivered with his death and burial. I wanted to be left bleary eyed and feeling Logan's pain but instead I was left feeling very indifferent about it. The only thing that brought it back for me was Jackman's sterling acting skills. Similarly, immediately after burying Prof. X Logan returns to his truck, which fails to start. In a moment of overwhelming frustration, anger and grief at losing his father figure Logan takes the shovel he had just used to bury his mentor and savagely attacks the vehicle before passing out from exhaustion and the strain of his prior injuries that are slow to heal. This moment should have been heart rendering and poignant but I was just left feeling reminded of Basil Fawlty, giving his unreliable little red car "a damn good thrashing". It seems others thought the same as there was a murmur of giggles in the cinema at the slapstick attack, which felt out of place given the sombre occasion.

Similarly, at the end of the movie Logan goes up against X24 once more to save Laura and the other mutant children from the genetic institution where they were made. Lacking virtually any powers of healing Logan is forced to fight a younger, stronger version of himself in a fight to the death, which ultimately results in X24 impaling Logan on and tree branch and delivering the fatal blow, just before Laura blows X24's head off with an adamantium bullet that Logan had been saving for years.

What we are left with is an emotional farewell between father and daughter and a moment of clarity (echoing Charles moment of clarity before his death) where Logan comes to embrace the fact that he has a daughter and understands what Charles was trying to tell him about family, albeit all too late. Again, I was left wanting to feel more emotional about Logan's death. Stealing the show in this scene wasn't Jackman, it was in fact Dafne Keen who plays the young Laura. We see her being vulnerable for the first time in the movie as she kneels by her father and holds his hand as he dies.

Her eulogy for her father is taken straight from Charles Xavier favourite movie Shane (1953). Charles and Laura watched this movie together in a hotel room in Oklahoma earlier on in the film. As a side note, the story of Shane is very similar to that of Logan. Shane is that of a man who is a skilled gunslinger with a violent and bloody past who moves to a small valley after the civil war and befriends a young boy called Joey. Shane learns that Joey, his family and the people of the valley are being terrorised by a ruthless cattle baron and his henchmen. It falls to Shane to stand up to them despite wanting to leave his life of violence behind him.

Laura's words at her fathers grave are lines form the movie Shane about a man stuck in his mould. That "there's no living with a killing" and that a brand sticks, right or wrong, there's no going back from it. A fitting eulogy and accurate description of the poor and wretched life that Logan has known, full of misery and suffering.

What eventually got my allergies going was Laura's parting act. As she moves to walk away form Logan's grave she stops and returns to the head of the grave where a crude wooden cross has been formed using two branches. She pulls it from the ground, turns it on it's side and pushes it into the ground to form an "X", before walking off to join her mutant friends and push on to Eden.

The movie as a whole was, in my opinion, excellent. It was brave and bold and the had none of the usual superhero movie tropes you would expect. In any other film the camera would linger on the grave as she walked off and just before cutting to the end credits the adamantium claws would shoot up from the dirt and we'd know that Logan was actually alright...but he isn't, he truly is dead.

I thought it was a very fitting end to Hugh Jackman's Logan, but I left the cinema feeling sad at what he had become and ultimately what happened to him. It was refreshing, but also depressing.

The question is, now that Wolverine is dead, how is he ever going to appear in Deadpool???! Well, my personal theory is that "Logan" takes place in 2029, and Deadpool takes place in current times. So there's still hope of a cameo from the big man himself in Deadpool 2.

-Jonny-