Logan

Just Claws
or
That Old Man Logan...He Just Keeps "Shnikting" Along...

The X-Men series of films have had their good and bad editions, while the off-shoots of the most popular character from the comics and the films—Hugh Jackman's Wolverine—haven't had a really good film at all.

Until now.

Better late than never, I say, and it's extremely fortunate in that Jackman has stated Logan is his last appearance as Wolverine (yeah, we'll see...never say never). What is ironic is that, in this last Wolverine film, the best thing about it is that it strays from X-Men lore and comes up with a new concept that takes risks, if only because there is no continuity that needs to be saved and no sequel that degrades the stakes the character must overcome by ensuring his return. Logan treads No-X-Man's Land and that territory bears no marks of previous vehicles and feels as entirely fresh as an open road. 

The year is 2029 and all the X-Men are dead. No mutants have appeared in their wake. Their evolutionary pace has been stilled. John Howlett (Jackman) is making his way through life as a limousine driver-for-hire. He's older and not much wiser, suffering now from years of wounds as his healing powers are starting to shut down, while the adamantium lacing his bones is slowly killing him and he keeps himself going through the pain with pills and booze. His fares are enough to allow him to purchase special drugs from a surreptitious hospital contact.* But, they're not for him. They're for a special patient being secreted in Mexico.

That patient is Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), former head of the Xavier School for Gifted Children. Elderly now, and suffering from dementia, the old Professor X needs to be heavily sedated, or his mental powers, now erratic, will cause seizures that will paralyze everyone in a very large area surrounding him. One such seizure killed the last remaining X-Men and Xavier is wracked by guilt and depression. He is kept medicated and watched over by Caliban (Stephen Merchant), an albino mutant-tracker, who must stay out of the sun or face debilitating burns.

But, Wolverine is being triangulated: first, he is being sought out by a nurse named Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who has with her a young girl named Laura (Dafne Keen)—Gabriela wants to hire Logan to take them to Canada where a secret facility named "Eden" can protect them; the second is Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a "modified" security agent for an organization named "Alkili Transigen" who is also looking for Gabriela, if only to find Laura, and knows that Logan has been contacted by her. He also seems to know that Professor X is in Mexico and has a great interest in him, as well.

Before you know it, Gabriela is dead, and all parties are in Mexico duking it out, and it is only then that the truth about Laura is known—she is a mutant, raised in the facility of Alkili Transigen to create a new line of weaponized "muties" bred from the ones who have gone before, and she has been cloned from a very specific DNA strain—Logan's. She has the healing powers and the claws, but being female, has a bit more—as in nature, the claws in her hands are for attack, but the ones in her feet, are for defense. Laura, designated "X-23," is a fighting machine, and her skills are ferocious and often devious.

A prolonged attack in Mexico sets the mutants on the run, ostensibly to Canada, but, for the short term, out of the way of Pierce and Transigen's gang of bio-mechanically enhanced "Rievers." But, they're never too far away, having captured Caliban and torturing him to track the fugitives. At the same time, Logan the loner must learn to deal with the possibility of being a reluctant hero for the ones under his charge, something he resists for all the death and destruction in his wake; as he tells Laura, "Bad shit happens to people I care about" "Then I'll be fine," is her aware reply..

It is the best of the Wolverine films, and it might be the best of the X-Men films (they've all blurred in my head these days). Since their inception (X-ception?), Marvel's mutant movies have been plagued by a fuzziness that has more to do with the inability to focus on any one member or conflict because the things are stacked from fade-in to fade-out with too many characters all demanding some amount of screen-time (you can see the same thing happening with the Avengers line of films, only two in). Here, Logan doesn't spend the whole movie ignoring the platitudes of dozens of pep-talkers, it's just him being "Mad Max" wrestling with his own conscience to get in the fight rather than being lectured to, constantly. Just as sure as the adamantium inside is killing him, he's shredding himself internally over his reluctance to commit.

Perhaps taking some courage from the box-office of Deadpool (there is a short, goofy interlude featuring that character pre-film), Logan is rated R—and a hard R—for violence and pervasive shnikting.** It is a problem with the X-Men films—and Wolverine in particular—that this most popular character is also the most violent, slashing, carving, dicing, gashing, eviscerating, and disembowling anything that comes across his path. The comics get away with it by showing the side of the victim that isn't being shredded or by hiding it in a swing-arc. The movies get away with it by keeping the action off-frame or (dare I say it?) "cutting away," thus (dare I say it again?) "under-cutting" the character and his ginzu-power. Logan's Wolverine cuts off hands, heads, guts people, rams his claws into eyes, foreheads and delivers one nasty upper-cut. 

"One nasty uppercut." They should have named him "Pierce"

...and curses like a sailor with a limited vocabulary. But, it's the surgeries that earned the rating. It lends the movie and the character a bit more desperation than we've seen previously and, in so doing, raises the stakes (ouch...can't get away from the puns) of the film.

Director James Mangold did the last unimpressive 'Wolverine-in-Japan" film which managed to not bring to mind any of the strong iconography of the comics in that setting. Here, however, telling a more personal story, with a much-weakened character and with less X-ephemera, that works far better than any previous attempts. And he ends it with a late, craggy Johnny Cash song (not "Hurt" as in the trailers—Mangold directed Walk the Line, the very good Cash bio-pic, by the way) that couldn't be more apt as a coda. Logan is tough and tender, and finally, does the character some justice, and makes the task of replacing Jackman a little bit more daunting. Good on them.

* And, seemingly, an endless supply of gasoline. That limo gets a lot of miles on it, and it's mileage must be incredible, as we never, ever see Logan fill the tank.

** I know, it's supposed to be "SNIKT!" but I was a sound-designer, dude, and when those claws go through wolverine's knuckle skin, it's going to make a "sch" sound so I think it's "SHNIKT!"