[Film Review] Logan

Note: This review contains spoilers.

Making a character study-type film on beloved superhero-with-a-darkside Wolverine is the kind of idea that is obviously going to be successful, especially if you shade the entire thing in R-rated violence after the character has been relatively restrained in his PG-13 outings.  The real question is whether or not the character had much to benefit from that kind of tense examination.  Logan wants to really dig in to the Wolverine character, to examine him completely and to a satisfying conclusion.  Wolverine isn't some background character, though.  He's been a major focus of just about every X-Men film he's been in, and he even has two solo films under his name preceding Logan (to those keeping count, that means he has had a major role in six of the nine films, not including this one).  The idea that this character had room for character exploration is either ambitious or ludicrous, either something meant to bring new life and complexity into a well known character or retread all that we know and play it like revelation.  Instead, Logan is a goodbye to a well known, well worn character. 

Wolverine's arch is well known, essentially reached in the first film, and fleshed out in the second: loner amnesiac with a violent temper learns to become part of a family of similar people and use his destructive behavior to protect that newfound vulnerability.  Days of Future Past allowed for some irony out of this, forcing this character to switch places with the moral center Professor X, who was now the hopeless loner and Wolverine the confident moral center, but otherwise Wolverine has pretty much been static in that familial vulnerability since the first film.  Logan knows this, and so takes everything away from him.  Wolverine's family, the X-Men, are dead, but not just dead: killed by his father figure Professor X.  Wolverine has Professor X hidden just on the other side of the Texas-Mexican border and medicated to prevent the Professor from suffering seizures that can kill those around him.  The medication, however, scrambles Professor X's brain, leaving him a dementia ridden shell of who he was.  In the current year of the film, 2029, it has reportedly been 25 years since a mutant was born, and all illusions they were the chosen evolution of man have been disintegrated.  Not only this, but Wolverine's adamantium skeleton has begun to poison him, and his healing powers are no longer up to snuff.  Wolverine isn't back to being the exact jaded man he was before, he's much worse and now suicidal, carrying around an adamantium bullet for when the time finally comes.  Logan places the character in his worst case scenario after his arch in the previous films: what if he lost it all?  The subtle genius of this concept is that he didn't lose all of it, but the one part he has left is at the same time the one at fault for his losing the rest: Professor X.  And now, old and dying and jaded, he spends his final days tending to the dying old man, the one who took everything from him and is simultaneously everything he has left.

It is a good set up, and places us in the proper position with Wolverine's character to bring as around to the arch this film actually wants to tell us:  what if Wolverine had to confront his past, the person/thing he fears being again and the person/thing he fears he cannot fully expunge himself of, while at the same time embracing his future, the way he could have been and still can be?  Wolverine's journey starts when he accidentally gets involved with transporting a mutant child to South Dakota where the last of the mutants are meeting to go to Eden, a mutant refuge in Canada.  The child, as it turns out, is Wolverine's daughter, prone to violence like he is, slicing the heads off anyone to get in her way with her adamantium claws.  Much like Wolverine, she was experimented on, this time by a secret government organization that, as it turns out, was responsible for annihilating the mutant population (while breeding them themselves to train as weapons).  They had a sample of Wolverine's DNA and where able to clone him, using the semen from this clone to create a daughter from Wolverine.  The child escaped with the help of a nurse at this agency's facility, and Wolverine accidentally (partially due to Professor X's insistence, even in his fragmented mental state) becomes involved in the transport.  Laura, Wolverine's daughter, is a second chance for Wolverine, even if he is literally the only one who can't see it.  She is borderline feral at times, mute for over an hour of the film and often quick to bloody her claws, while at other times incredibly intelligent, able to get Wolverine out of trouble and drive him to a hospital (it should be noted Laura is probably no more than 11 years old).  The central conflict of the film meets within Wolverine: he is responsible for this child even against his wishes, while struggling with his own mortality and struggling with the fantasy of the X-Men and what they stood for.  Wolverine finds out, about halfway through the film, that Eden was found through an issue of an old X-Men comic, a violent confrontation with his legacy and the faith he had in it at one point.  The misdirection here, of course, is that it was never an Eden outright in South Dakota or Canada, but that other escapees from that government facility -- and Laura's friends -- had chosen this location from a comic book to meet and make it over the border.  It wasn't about believing in a fantasy, it was about making a fantasy a reality.  Wolverine had lost that a long time ago.  Hope, as the Professor would say.  It had died in the old generation, but was ripe and angry in the youth.

The climax has Laura and Logan fight and kill the Wolverine clone, lethally wounding Logan in the process.  He literally kills his past with the help of his future, a bit on the nose but effective enough.  I sum this up in a couple sentences here because, as good as Logan is, I can't help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the whole thing.  It's a movie that would have been far more effective before the overabundance of antiheroes or dark, gritty movies.  We are ten years past The Dark Knight, a time ripe for Logan to have been released, but in the current climate of much more loose and fun blockbusters, it feels slightly out of place.  A good movie nonetheless, but it has an incline of the long running series it is a part of, the just-shy-of-over-saturation that is the Wolverine character, and the fact that, though R-rated super hero films are still somewhat of a novelty, adding some blood and fucks doesn't quite dislodge the film from the greater super hero genre, which is at peak saturation at this point.  Looking at the film solo, as the director numerous times implied was his intention, doesn't really work to the film's best interest because the film plays with Wolverine as a character (although there is enough context here to work alone), and looking at the film as part of a series is a bit exhausting, even if it does provide one of the best send offs a super hero has ever had (yes, even better than those in Endgame).  It's a good film I want to gush about, but just don't have the passion for.  It's a film that wears its legacy for the impression of weight, but that weight isn't felt dramatically outside of ambience.  It has little interaction outside of little pinpricks of character, all of which we've seen before even if it wasn't so R-rated cynical.  It's well made and deserving of the character, but it isn't someplace new.  It's someplace we've been many times before, just better done.



7.5