Logan, film review: Why so serious?

Hugh Jackman dons metal claws one last time for his superb final outing as Wolverine in this X-Men movie that pushes superhero films even further into adult feeling than the Dark Knight trilogy, says David Sexton
David Sexton22 November 2017

Last year the filthy, violent, fast and silly superhero extravaganza Deadpool became not only the highest grossing X-Men film but the highest grossing R-rated film of all time. So here was some useful info: superhero films don’t have to be aimed primarily at kids (R means under-17s must be accompanied by an adult). Maybe they can even speak not just to grown-ups but what Terry Wogan used to call coffin-dodgers?

James Mangold, the writer/director of Logan, made 2013’s The Wolverine but his career previous to that had not been with the superheroes. He made, for example, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005) and the tough Western, 3.10 to Yuma (2007).

Logan — which, counting the cameos, amounts to Hugh Jackman’s ninth and possibly final turn as Wolverine — is not just a film for adults, it’s a film about ageing and superannuation. Retirement even. And after. It’s an exits, not origins, movie.

Logan (aka Wolverine) is still hulking, still deadly and full of rage, but he’s a grey-beard, short-sighted and limping, scarred and drinking hard. He’s hurting. While he can still recover from injuries, it no longer happens quite so easily or so quickly. He’s being poisoned from within, perhaps by all that adamantium? We don’t know exactly how old he is but he is feeling his age and has just about had enough of it all. Like many veterans.

Jackman is, once more, superb, holding down the whole film: no matter how battered, gnarled and shrubby he looks, you always root for him. A bit of a beast — but our beast.

The year is 2029, 50 years since the events of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). Our shambling, alcoholic wreck is earning a living by driving a limo for party-girls, holing up between times in a derelict industrial plant on the edge of a dusty oil field in deepest Texas.

He needs the money to buy illicit drugs to keep quiet the more or less senile, wheelchair-bound Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) who, when not sedated, has seizures in which he is still capable of causing havoc merely with his thoughts. Addressed as an octogenarian, Xavier retorts that he’s actually a nonagenarian. Logan, although probably much older than that himself, looks after him as one would an Aged P. They’re family, sort of.

A third ancient mutant, whiny albino Caliban (Stephen Merchant), tends to the pair: the whole set-up deliberately evokes Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. (“Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished,” for starters).

There have been no new mutants for 25 years — they’re illegal — yet after one of his scary turns, Xaviert insists a young one is coming. And come she does. Laura is not exactly Logan’s daughter but she has been developed from his DNA at Transigen, a secret lab in Mexico, which cultivates mutant children for military purposes.

This mini-Wolverine is wonderfully well-played by 11-year-old Dafne Keen, who has a fetching weirdness about her and is able to switch in an instant from a normal little girl to a terrifyingly vengeful scissorhands. While Logan erupts in general fury, she seems positively spiteful in her gambolling assassinations.

On her trail is malign and therefore ever-so-English scientist Zander Rice (Richard E Grant), who dispatches a cybernetic brute called Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook, nasty) with his team of “Reavers” to capture her and put an end to Logan and Xavier too. Moreover, Donald has on his team an unimpaired replica of the Wolverine called X-24, so Logan has his work cut out fighting himself as he used to be, as it were.

Logan, Xavier and Laura take to the road ­— quite the family outing, quite the road movie — heading through wastelands towards the epic Western-style landscapes of North Dakota, where Laura insists there’s a safe place for the mutant children called Eden.

In one of the film’s self-deconstructions, Logan realises she has garnered this story from an X-Men comic book. “They’re all bullshit — only a quarter of it happened,” he says. Nonetheless, he tries to help her get where she needs to go, even though he suspects it’s a fantasy, even though his own body is beginning to break down.

Family, sort of: Logan looks after an aged Professor Charles Xavier

Logan has a novel texture for a superhero film, fundamentally a road movie through Rust Belt and rural America, a country in decline, almost the only indication of any futurity being driverless trucks charging down the highways.

It is filmed darkly, in the mode of serious cinema, instead of emulating comic-book framing. The violence here is bloody and horrific — impalings right through the skull, eviscerations, beheadings — making you realise how much of this is lightly skipped over in previous Wolverine outings.

Yet Logan is penitent and bereaved. Gradually he bonds with Laura. “You have nightmares,” he observes when she wakes screaming.

“Yes, people hurt us.”

“Mine are different,” Logan says, “I hurt people.”

“I’ve hurt people too,” says Laura.

I am sorry to say the Daddy card is played quite hard as the movie enters its final phase.

Life on the road: Laura (Dafne Keen) and Logan (Hugh Jackman)

Also played hard is the analogy with the great 1953 Alan Ladd western, Shane, about a killer who knows he cannot stay with the people he saves. Our fugitives watch it on TV in a motel.

“This is a very famous picture — almost 100 years old,” Xavier instructs Laura, as Shane speaks the great lines: “A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can’t break the mould. I tried it and it didn’t work for me.” Later, little Laura will continue the elegy: “There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand.”

It’s a heck of a claim for James Mangold to make for Logan — that it’s in the same territory as this classic, a claim to epic status also made by playing out to Johnny Cash’s tremendously moving version of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt (“I hurt myself today/ to see if I still feel/ I focus on the pain/ The only thing that’s real”).

Here’s the rub. Can superhero films be so serious? So real? There’s a wonderful passage in the late Simon Gray’s Smoking Diaries where he writes about what Shane has meant to him for 50 years, saying he has seen some of its scenes more than 30 times, and that he’ll go on watching it until nature prevents him.

Shane, he says, “makes us know and feel what an act of murder is”, contrasting this achievement bitterly with “the foul and vacuous Lord of the Rings, with its interminable set pieces of hideous slaughter”, which had just been voted the nation’s favourite film.

A pretty good test case, then, Logan, with its masterful, even heartfelt, performance by Jackman. It aims to take the superhero film even further into adult feeling than the Dark Knight trilogy. Do we follow, mutants and high-speed massacres notwithstanding? Some do, some don’t. I can’t.

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