Logan, the latest
(and maybe last, but you know how money talks) Wolverine-centric film in the X-Men franchise, contains one of the
most jarring moments I’ve ever felt in a superhero movie. It takes place after
an unhurried sequence in the middle of the story in which our heroes stop to
rest at the farmhouse of kind strangers. Sharing a meal, they enjoy quietly the
generosity offered by this kind, warm, family of normal people. For a gentle
pause, they aren’t mutants on the run in a hard-charging action movie. They
simply exist in the world. When violence crashes back into the picture it
crashes hard. There’s a mad scientist, an evil clone, shotguns and
decapitations. The whiplash is harsh, discordant. I found I had been so
involved in the humanity, the real character, of the prior sequence I was
suddenly resisting the intrusion of genre dictates. But that’s part of the
film’s gutting approach, with glum pessimism leaving barely enough energy to
squeeze itself into the expected clichés that come with a cinematic superhero
suit. It’s small-scale, soft-spoken, and soulful.
Inspired by the darkest and bloodiest of Wolverine comics,
writer-director James Mangold (with co-writers Scott Frank and Michael Green) makes a bracing,
atypical vision, with stretched anamorphic subtlety in the staging and stubborn
downbeat grime in the mood. (This is certainly less colorful than his
Japanese-set The Wolverine.) For a
while it’s quite exhilarating to knock about in a far future (yet too close for
comfort) world where the X-Men are gone for unexplained reasons and mutant kind
is slowly dying out. Once rare, now rarer, no new mutant has been born in two
decades. Natural born, that is. The plot hinges on Laura (Dafne Keen), an
11-year-old test tube mutant fleeing the evil corporation that made her. Its
lead scientist (Richard E. Grant) wants to make gene-spliced lab-grown soldiers
from the greatest hits of X-genes. But now one young subject has escaped, and
she ends up running into an exhausted Logan (Hugh Jackman) and half-senile
Professor X (Patrick Stewart) hiding out in the middle of nowhere at the
U.S./Mexican border. A mercenary (Boyd Holbrook) with a bionic hand gives
chase, and the tired old pair of marquee mutants must once more do all they can
to save the future of their kind.
Placed at the far worst-case-scenario end of the film
franchise’s timeline, this entry has a sorrowful finality about it. Not a grand
ensemble epic, this is instead a sad and lonely chase picture, imagining the
dwindling mutant population as a demonized, hunted minority. Average folks see
them as a distant memory immortalized in comic book legends of yore.
Corporations are deputized to round them up, hound them to extinction, and
extract monetized power from them all the way there. Mangold and company take
this all very seriously (or, rather, as seriously as you can while still
including an evil clone). It’s bleak, watching characters we love like
Jackman’s Wolverine and Stewart’s Professor X miserable and weary, on the
precipice of giving up or death, whichever comes first. Because we’ve seen
these great performers inhabit these roles for nearly twenty years now, there’s
tremendous audience affection on which to draw, making their plight only more
poignant. The early going emphasizes their isolation, pushing them into corners
of the frames, surrounded by crumbling structures or grotesque “normality.” When
the mute young mutant shows up needing help, the tremor of sentimentality, of
hope for the future, feels life sustaining.
Cranking the gore up way past PG-13 and well into R, the
line on which the previous movies about a mostly-immortal healing beast man
with metal claw hands were already dancing, the movie takes an interest in
imagining the toll a life of superhero violence would take on a person. Add to
that the sense of despair over a history of fighting for your cohort’s safety
and ending up with nothing to show for it, the movie’s core of physical,
psychological, and moral exhaustion is often harrowing. Affecting, mournful,
and with genuine surprise and sorrow behind its deaths gives many a bloody slice
and stab its due weight. Where most superhero movies take violence as mindless
sensory overload, the X-movies have often been embodied, concerned with the
horror of mutation and the squirming ways the human body can turn on itself.
This one in particular feeds its exciting action sequences with simple staging
and brisk splatter. Wolverine is a reluctant hero, here at his most reluctant,
a feature-length version of his answer to the question asked about his claws in
2000’s X-Men: “When they come out,
does it hurt?” “Every time.”
That Mangold can pull it off while still spinning a
crowd-pleasingly amusing, exciting actioner is a testament to the resiliency
and elasticity of the franchise, and the willingness of cast and crew to put
real heart into the slow, simple, quiet moments. Jackman’s Wolverine has always
had a wounded soul beneath his star-power charisma, and here he lays it bare.
He’s raw, scraping together just enough power for one last good deed. It’s a fitting
tribute to the character to make what may be his farewell to the role with such
a considered, complicated, and, yes, mature, performance. His scenes with
Stewart crackle with genuine affection and history. Their new dependent is a
wild animal when provoked (revealing a kinship between the old warrior and the
young fugitive). The three of them just might make it to safety, but what then?
The end-of-the-line futility gives even the fleeting moments of goodness and
sweetness a sour aftertaste. The film has a compelling commitment to a certain
slicing serenity, suspense visceral and absorbing yet filtered through a state
of zen weariness. It knows we’re all dying, the world is collapsing, and
nothing will ever again be as good as it once seemed. But maybe it’s worth
trying every day to make sure children are equipped with the opportunities to
do better than us with what little we can leave them.
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