Logan (2017) - Review
Originally published July 2017I started watching Logan with just a vague idea of what to expect. I was familiar with the character, being a former comic book fan. I was even familiar with the setting of the film: a story that takes place after all the X-Men are gone and Wolverine has started to lose his mutant powers. I also knew that the filmmakers were going to take advantage of the R rating after the success of Deadpool proved that you could make a financially successful R-rated comic-book movie. What I wasn't expecting, was how much I'd ended up liking Logan.
I haven't kept up much with the superhero movies that have come out in the past decade. I used to be really into comics as a kid, especially the Marvel-branded ones. When the first X-Men movie came to theaters in 2000, I was excited. It was a somewhat above-average action movie that was made better by one of the best casting jobs in Hollywood. The direct sequel elevated the franchise to new heights and the third, X3, managed to destroy all that positive momentum. After that, I didn't bother to keep up with all the movies as they came out. I haven't seen all the X-Men, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Avengers, or Spider-Man movies, and I've only seen one of the Wolverine-branded movies (the bad one). The spectacle of it all wasn't interesting to me anymore. Superhero movies were fun the first time around, but now there are a dozen a year that all try to top each other in scale, but rarely in depth. My tastes in what I wanted out of superhero entertainment have changed, but the goals of these movies have not.
Lo and behold, Logan is a superhero movie that fills the void. It does not try to go big, but deep. Logan, while still a story about Wolverine, drops his nickname title and the X-Men from the name, as though the film is trying to distance itself as much as possible from any brand or genre relation. It's trying to stand on its own and tell a character drama without being bogged down by the past, which is heavily implied but kept intentionally vague. It's a smart move on the film's part, which is one of many.
Image: 20th Century Fox
Pros
Action is exciting and well-shot
Character drama is surprisingly deep and impactful with great performances
The R-rating provides more room for the character to be as violent and convincingly Wolverine than he's been in the past
Smart use of subtlety and ambiguity
Moves at a steady pace that has plenty of intended peaks and valleys in the action
Cons
Some rather obvious brand advertising
Various plot devices could have been done better
If you don't have any previous knowledge of the characters, you might be a bit lost
The last lines of the movie that are taken from the Western Shane feel unnecessary
Plot & Thoughts
Logan is a bleak movie. In 2029, the former X-man's life is in shambles as he seems to be barely functioning as a person. He drives a limo for a living, chaperoning shitheads and bachelorettes around cities in Texas to help pay for supplies for himself and the former Professor X, as well as slowly saving up for a small houseboat that he can take to escape. What he's escaping from and why he's so desperate to get on a boat is never really explained, but we know it's both a personal issue and something terrible that happened in the past involving the X-Men. One of the biggest strengths of the movie's writing is that it tells you just enough about past events without going into too much detail. What caused Wolverine and Professor Xavier to end up as fugitives is never fully disclosed, but we know that it involved both of them. We slowly learn more about it and other pieces of the past over the course of the movie through small snippets of dialogue, while the actors fill some of the rest with some great emotional acting.
Image: 20th Century Fox
The story isn't just about Logan and Charles stuck in a hideout talking about their regrets, however. You're not going to make a movie about a guy with knives on his hands so he could spend two hours working out his problems with Dr. Phil. There needs to be some physical conflict, and a lot of it shows up when the young girl Laura comes into their lives. She, like Logan is running from something, but the people chasing her are far more interested in catching her. While he's extremely resistant to getting involved in her issues, Logan can't deny his sense of morality and decides to help the girl, putting him and Xavier at risk and on the run. It takes a little while to get there, but once Logan and Laura team up, the film starts to really move. It becomes something of a road trip adventure as the three of them try to avoid being captured by the ominous corporation hunting them.
Of all the movies I watched recently on my long plane rides (Rogue One; John Wick 2; Shin Godzilla), Logan is my favorite. The acting, the pacing, the dialogue, and the action all help elevate this film far above my initial expectations. Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for more than 15 years, and, while he's always been a great casting choice physically, there have been times when his performance was not 100% convincing. I think his performance here, however, is the best he's done as the character. Part of that has to do with the writing this time around, as the crap he's had to say in previous X-Men movies certainly didn't help much. I also think the direction played a part in getting the most out of Jackman's skills. Considering how the same director, James Mangold, first worked with Jackman on Kate and Leopold—a very different movie—and then eventually on The Wolverine, there was probably a little more of a connection and an understanding and familiarity between the two about the ranges Jackman could take the character. Jackman does a commendable job portraying a man who is slowly dying and who is too bitter to get close to anyone in his life because of all the tragedy that has befallen him. He really sold the saddest moments of the film in a way that struck me in ways I did not expect.
Image: 20th Century Fox
And it's not just Jackman. The chemistry of the other characters interacting with Logan helps improve what's there and makes up for the various shortcomings. Patrick Stewart reprises his role as Charles Xavier, the world's most powerful psychic, who is in the early stages of the world's worst brain disease. At first, the degenerative nature of his sickness seemed like it was going to be over the top with him drugged up and reciting commercial catchphrases he could hear in his head, but it gets dialed back and is more subtle and convincing throughout the film. He's tired and bitter as well, but he exhibits the symptoms of someone with early-onset Alzheimer's, like a slight paranoia to those familiar to him, or a tendency to revert to a childish personality. He also occasionally jumps around in subject matter when he talks. It's actually subtle enough that I didn't really notice it at first.
Even Dafne Keen, who plays the young Laura, does a great job. It's difficult to find a child actor who can sell a role, and it's probably even more difficult to find one who can pull off the stunts she does, but they found her. She does a great job of being both a kid with limited social skills and a cold-blooded killer. Apparently, she had to go through some physical combat training for the role so that when the choreographers worked with her on set, she could handle what they threw at her.
Image: 20th Century Fox
The training helped, because all the action sequences, from the car chases to the blade fights are well-shot and dramatic without getting too big. In the world of superhero movies with superficial characterization bookended by fight sequences that blow up buildings more efficiently than Godzilla, it's refreshing to have an X-Men movie feel more like John Wick meets Gran Turino. The action is appropriately smaller, visceral, and desperate for characters who are not all-powerful and who just want to escape. More importantly, it doesn't feel like that's the reason to see the movie. The reason to see Logan is the drama; it's to see the evolution of his character at his lowest point and what he goes through to get out of it.
Logan is not a perfect movie, by any means. It still relies on some cheap plot devices to move the story along or set up some dramatic sequences. It manages to get away with some of it because of the use of other writing and storytelling techniques, namely: foreshadowing and repetition. There are small details, such as the mysterious green serum that helps mutants increase their abilities, which we have to just accept at face value. We don't know what it is, but the characters sum it up quickly in a few dialogue exchanges. At the very least, however, details like the green Gatorade keep appearing in multiple scenes, so we get a sense that it's going to come in handy later. None of the small details, cheap as they may feel at first, are just thrown in there out of nowhere. Some effort is made to make them a little more acceptable.
Image: 20th Century Fox
Still, there are some other plot devices that don't quite justify themselves, like the phone-edited documentary or the mid-western family Logan and crew meet along their journey. The phone documentary you have to just accept as a quick method of exposition and suspend your disbelief that a woman would take the time to edit all of her secret footage on her phone in a dramatic fashion with a voice-over perfectly placed. Even if it is a 2029 phone with some advanced editing apps, I don't think the character who is running from a corporation would have had the time or the frame of mind to cut and edit her video just so Wolverine could see it one day. And the mid-western family exists just to slow the movie down and give everyone a break, even though the characters should know better than to get involved. You'll have to see the movie to know exactly what I'm talking about, but once you do, you'll probably understand my issues with these little flaws. Obvious plot devices they may be, but they're not unbearable and help the movie more than hurt it.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Hugh Jackman has publicly said that Logan would be the last movie in which he would play Wolverine, and what a way to go out. I admit, my appreciation for Logan might be heavily augmented by the fact that I have low expectations for these movies, or that I'm just tired of the same superhero formula, but it's a movie that I found to be better than it had any right to be. It's refreshing to see a superhero movie that goes to such effort to explore a character, while still providing some solid action and without attempting to reach an epic scale. The violence is gruesome, but it doesn't feel out of place for the story Logan is trying to tell, which is an emotionally intense and melancholic one. It's certainly not the first time filmmakers have attempted to dive into Wolverine's character and develop him in a meaningful way, but it feels like this time they really succeeded.
Do you agree or disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments!
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