- After James Mangold's The Wolverine proved that it was possible to make a pretty-good Wolverine movie, I was hoping that the director's second visit to the character would prove to be great. After watching Logan, I have come to believe that Mangold did indeed succeed in making a great adaptation. Unfortunately, it's a great adaptation of those versions of Wolverine I really don't like, meaning that the film is exceedingly violent, unrelentingly dour, and intentionally ugly. Sure, it's much better than Mark Millar's atrocious Old Man Logan, but that should hardly be the standard for anything.
- The story: A dozen or so years in the future, Logan (Hugh Jackman) is semi-retired, splitting his time between limo-driving spoiled Americans across the Mexican border and caring for the aging Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). With the help of Caliban (Stephen Merchant), an albino who can track other mutants, Logan keeps Professor X on a retinue of drugs to inhibit his "psychic seizures" that we gather killed off the remaining X-Men. The trio eke out a living, hiding out in a Mexican junkyard, until one day a woman (Elizabeth Rodriguez) recruits Logan to transport her young daughter Laura (Dafne Keen) to North Dakota. The woman ends up dead, Laura lands with Logan and company, and things turn from bad to worse.
- The villains of the piece, a cybernetically-enhanced enforcer named Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and a scientist named Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant), work for a private corporation seeking to create and control a new breed of mutant. Anybody familiar with the comics can guess how Laura fits into all of this, and the film's best moment arrives early on, when Pierce's modified goon squad finds themselves outmatched by a surprisingly resilient 11-year-old. Logan and the professor grab Laura and run, making a few new friends (Eriq La Salle, Elise Neal) on their way to a destination that Logan worries may be as fictional as the X-Men comics everyone in the future seems to read.
- As in The Wolverine, Mangold's biggest achievement in Logan may be how well he captures scenery, in this case consisting of a dilapidated junkyard, flashy casinos, and mountainous backdrops. Come to think of it, the scenery was also the best thing about Shane, an equally overrated and laborious film that Logan spends several minutes referencing. Although the performances are all strong from Jackman, Stewart, and Keen, the latter of whom is wonderfully expressive despite only getting in a few lines, the film's dreary tone, constant eruptions of R-rated violence, and lackluster badguys (Liev Schreiber, this movie needed you!), make Logan a real slog. Maybe it's just me, but I liked the X-Men a lot more back when the professor didn't curse, death was much more rare, and everything wasn't so awful.
