Movie Review: James Mangold’s “Logan” is part neo-noir, part Western, part superhero lament, and 110% ass-kickery.
“A man has to be what he is, Joey.”
“There’s no living with the killing. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back. Now you run on home to your mother, and tell her everything’s all right. And there are no more guns in the valley.”
- “Shane,” A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Jack Sher (screenplay), 1953.
Both of these aforementioned quotes, taken from the landmark Western Shane, figure heavily into Logan, the most recent X-Men spin-off and the latest attempt to try and get the character of Wolverine (a.k.a. Logan, Weapon X) right. The second quote is the one that bookends the film, but there’s an equally moving scene about midway through the proceedings that I feel gets to the heart of what Logan truly is, and what place it occupies in the ever-expanding Marvel Comics Universe.
Patrick Stewart, reprising the role of telekinetic genius Professor Charles Xavier for the umpteenth time, sits on a hotel bed with a small girl (Dafne Keen) who is also a mutant. It is a rare moment of calm in an otherwise busy and brutal film: the characters are pausing for a moment of respite, and so are is the audience. In a beautifully thrown-away moment, Xavier waxes nostalgic about the first time he saw the film, his voice lilting with the sound of fond remembrance for a time that will never come again. All the while, the young girl’s eyes stay glued to the screen, hungrily scanning George Steven’s images of sun-dappled mid-century Western Americana like the whole thing is some kind of religious rite of passage.
Perhaps it is. Logan, in spite of technically being billed as a superhero movie, is a film filled with lonesome desert vistas, whispered threats, sequences of rugged combat, and incidental moments of pure, wistful cowboy allure. The movie is also possessed by a kind of downbeat yearning that is unusual for a superhero film, since these types of enterprises tend to be more frivolous and less concerned with issues like grief, mortality and the like.
I’m sure director James Mangold (Cop Land, Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) was told by 20th Century Fox executives that this lovely little Shane homage had to go, but I’m beyond glad that it stayed in the picture because, in a way, this one aside neatly sums up what’s ultimately so great about Logan. Strange though it may seem, I doubt the experience of sitting down in a theater to watch the film would be the same without this seemingly inconsequential interval. By pointing our attention to this excerpt of an older, more traditionally-made film, the filmmakers of Logan are drawing a connective through-line from yesterday’s Western mythmaking to the popular folklore of today, without ever putting too fine a point on it. The resulting movie moment made me want to stand up in my seat and cheer.
Logan is undoubtedly one of the most successful attempts to shake up the stolid creative DNA that has turned Marvel Studios into the cinematic equivalent of McDonald’s, pumping out Happy Meal after Happy Meal (Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, etc.) to keep audiences satiated, but never nurtured. I suppose I should just come right out with it, then: Logan is no Happy Meal. Logan is a four-course fine meal disguised as fast food, served by a talented chef and prepared extra bloody. It is one of the very best of the Marvel films and perhaps one of the great superhero movies, period: a hyper-violent, emotionally resonant tale of mythology and family whose scenes of quiet dramatic discord linger almost longer than the innumerable scenes of skull-bashing, limb-hacking and face-slicing.
No doubt, plenty of fanboys will come to see a buff, raging Hugh Jackman use his adamantium claws in ways that X-Men devotees never thought possible, and to be fair, the film does play beautifully as a savage, hard-R-rated action movie that hearkens back to a time when movie violence packed an honest punch. And yet, there is a deeper melancholy running through Logan’s corroded veins, one that only really rears its head upon retrospective reflection. After so many dull, brainless comic book blockbusters have threatened to sap all the wonder from their respective source materials, Logan is here to restore a much-needed sense of earnest reverence to what some consider to be today’s most enduring popular franchise. It’s a movie that absolutely kicked my ass all up and down the theater aisles and when the end result is this rollicking and pure, I’m hardly inclined to complain.
Of course, there’s a ton of Shane in Logan. There are also shades of Clint Eastwood’s great Unforgiven, another gloomy, pessimistic film about retired desperadoes, their unsettled scores and their families. I also detected notes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day in the portrait that Logan fashions of its chief villains: the kind of grim, corporatist cyborgs who want to siphon the last remains of vitality from our collective culture. In the father-daughter relationship that gives the movie its emotional backbone, there are traces of the original, John Wayne-starring True Grit, as well as elements of Rolling Thunder in the movie’s sadistic vigilante tone. Logan’s barren, color-depleted desert landscape also sometimes recalls the early, grubbier Mad Max movies, particularly The Road Warrior, which also views its central badass in a messianic light.
Of course, James Mangold is a director with an authorial stamp all his own. In films both good (Cop Land, Heavy) and bad (Identity), Mangold has displayed a sensitive and loving eye for the run-down badlands of middle America: the various dive bars, flophouse motels and sun-scorched passages of dirt road that make up the vast swath of our collective national imagination. He’s also a fine actor’s director, even in films that are bloated on their own sense of glossy pomposity (his skillfully made but overrated Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line) or films that don’t even really call for good acting to begin with (the Tom Cruise-starring actioner Knight and Day). As such, Logan is stacked with honest, believable performances, and Mangold, to his immense credit, never undercuts the sincerity of the Wolverine myth. If what we’re to believe is true and this is the furry guy’s final rodeo, Mangold has delivered the mutant’s swan song in a shimmering note of glory that will send true comic book geeks into waves of pure ecstatic shock.
Logan’s grown-up timbre and its willingness to reckon with weighty existential themes puts it roughly in the same category as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, still the only comic book adaptation to successfully marry noisy tentpole movie thrills with philosophical subtext and an unremittingly bleak aesthetic. As last year’s D.C. lineup showed us — particularly David Ayer’s confused Suicide Squad — that formula is not always a winning one. Portentousness can often be mistaken for edge and when these kinds of movies are poorly executed, they can be hell to sit through. One of the many clever strokes in Logan’s conception is the movie’s willingness to confidently settle into the mode of any given scene, given what the story logically requires. This is, refreshingly, a movie that absolutely knows when to slow down the pace, put the guns aside, and simply let the actors do their thing.
It is also a film that is not afraid to unleash unholy hell on its bad guys. Logan is often shockingly violent, containing scenes of over-the-top bloodletting and gore that reminded me of the great, bullet-ridden Bruckheimer/Simpson action spectacles of the late 80’s and early 90’s. Of course, many superhero movies are violent as hell: quick, how many people do you think died during the climactic, city-leveling melee in Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice? Of course, these deaths remain unseen throughout the film — the violence of Zack Snyder’s misunderstood God-vs.-Man smash-’em’-up is as bloodless as any Avengers flick, and thus earns the coveted PG-13 rating. Logan is unapologetically R-rated, the first Marvel flick since Deadpool to earn the label. But whereas Deadpool’s glib ruthlessness seemed dreamt up by an impudent teen seeking to irritate and disrupt without really adding anything of substance to the mix (in case you were wondering, the mirthless teaser for the Deadpool sequel does play before this movie), the violence in Logan sticks in your craw. When’s the last time you could describe the action of a superhero movie as… well, vicious?
Logan opens in the year 2029, when mutants are on the verge of extinction. The movie’s riotous opener, in which we find the erstwhile Wolverine sleeping in a car that’s about to get jacked, before carving up four gangbangers with technique and finesse usually reserved for Hibachi chefs, serves dual purposes. It lets us know exactly what kind of movie we’ll be watching — hellaciously violent, moody, alternately ruminative and silly — and also introduces us to this very sad, broken-down former hero at this point in his life. This Wolverine is not the snappy alpha dog of the Bryan Singer X-Men pictures. He’s tired. Everyone he’s ever known and loved is gone. He makes his meager ends meet by driving a limousine and returning to his junkyard abode every night to care for Professor Xavier (Stewart), who is now suffering from dementia and telekinetic episodes that have the unfortunate tendency to level entire city blocks. Though Logan technically has a roommate — a drolly funny albino mutant tracker, Caliban, played by The Office co-creator Stephen Merchant — Weapon X’s existence is a dreary and desolate one. His adamantium claws are poisoning his body, he seems to drink about a fifth of whiskey a day, and the world outside his door is frightening, cruel and unpredictable.
Our hero’s fate takes a turn when he encounters a kind woman named Gabriela. Through Gabriela, Logan meets Laura (Dafne Keen, in one of the year’s most remarkable performances), a child who is seemingly mute but also sharp and attentive, and who may or may not be a M.O.I. (Mutant of Interest) to certain sinister parties. One of the parties in question is called the Transgien Project, which appears to be a concerted effort to round up all existing mutants and either exterminate them or weaponize them for government use. This evil conglomerate comes personified in the visage of one Donald Pierce (a wolfish and menacing Boyd Holbrook), a gold-toothed brute who travels around with a squadron of cybernetically-enhanced enforcers called Reavers to do his murderous dirty work. What it essentially comes down to is that Pierce and his Reavers want Laura (whose mutant name is X-23) for their own sick gain, and Logan and Charles Xavier find themselves fleeing like hell across a godless wasteland to keep her safe. Along the way Logan discovers what many intuitive viewers will be able to pick up early on: that Laura is actually his estranged daughter, born with the same unquenchable homicidal rage and volatile extra-sensory powers as her mutton-chopped old man.
At one point, Charles tells Logan that young Laura “doesn’t need to be reminded of life’s impermanence”. This almost seems like a sly joke on the behalf of the writers, particularly since it comes after a passage where Logan self-consciously derides the committee-approved, anemic violence of popular superhero stories. “In real life,” he tells his daughter, “people die”. And in Logan, too. The body count in this movie soars to Olympian heights during the movie’s breathless climactic fight — which, in a welcome change of pace, turns out to not be a city-smashing brawl that centers around a swirling vortex in the clouds, but rather an old-school, beautifully-choreographed throwdown in the woods that pits Logan and Laura against Pierce and his fascist army.
Clueless moralists may object to the admittedly gruesome violence in Logan while missing a larger point: that the film’s violence is honest. If someone dies in Logan, it’s not brushed off, tossed aside or shown offscreen. This is a movie that prints a bloody handstamp on the timid blueprint of superhero movie violence, where civilian casualties often come at the expense of the caped guy/girl’s so-called heroism. And to what end? Though you may want to look away from the screen at some points, the death in “Logan” isn’t without weight or substance. It has heft, purpose and is executed with considerable dramatic flair. I’m not defending the movie’s unhinged ferocity, just attempting to put it in the appropriate context.
I’ve been hot and cold on Hugh Jackman for years now, but let’s face it: this is the role he was born to play. It’s one of the few parts where the Australian thespian’s tendency to go far over the top doesn’t derail his innate gift for characterization and his cocksure leading man aura. For fuck’s sake, it’s Jackman’s ninth go at the character over the course of seventeen years! As a result, Jackman seems more grizzled, more at ease in the role — he’s no longer trying to out chest-thump the guys next to him, and the character’s charismatic resignation fits the actor like a weather-beaten old leather jacket. Jackman seems to be playing Logan like a retired gunfighter who’s suiting up for one last buckaroo at the Mutant Corral. Stewart, meanwhile, is his usual charming and eloquent self, though I’ve never quite seen a composite of the famous Charles Xavier where the good Professor is as addle-brained and lost as he is in this film. It’s a bold decision, one that makes the character’s final stroke of providence all the more wrenching.
The big surprises of Logan, for me, were Boyd Holbrook and Dafne Keen. I’ve written Holbrook off as a sort of bland, Ryan Gosling-lite in the past: he’s the least interesting part of the Netflix crime drama Narcos and his appearances in films over the past few years (as Ed Harris’s drug dealer son in the Liam Neeson thriller Run All Night, or as Kristen Wiig’s love interest in the twee indie comedy The Skeleton Twins) haven’t fared much better, until now. Watching Holbrook in this role, it felt like I was watching a different performer entirely. Whereas the young actor has come off as stiff and self-serious in his other work, Holbrook’s turn as Donald Pierce is funny, campy and twisted in ways that suggest that he may, in fact, be a character actor with leading man good looks. Keen, meanwhile, gives one of those star-making performances that people will refer to as the launching point for a fruitful and enduring career for years to come. She is, in a word, sensational. The fact that she gives the movie’s most affecting and grounded performance and does it without almost any dialogue speaks to her natural talent, Mangold’s faith in his cast and the black, beating heart of Logan itself.
Could 2017 be the year that the comic book movie comes roaring back to life? After this and FX’s psychedelic, unreasonably fun Legion, which also has ties to the extended X-Men universe, it would appear that superhero stories are getting back to being fun again, without sacrificing their propensity for taking artistic liberties. With James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 right around the corner, now is looking like a pretty damn good time to be a geek. However, I suspect non-Marvel devotees will flock to Logan for much the same reason as seasoned X-Men acolytes enjoy it: because it is a great story, told with timeless flair and acted to near-perfection by a cast of seasoned professionals. If you like your muscled goons getting carved up next to scenes of soul-bearing emotional apoplexy, Logan might be your new favorite movie. For the rest of us, it’s merely a new high watermark for superhero films in general. D.C. Studios, take note.
Grade: A-
