Logan is the final X-Men movie with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. For now, at least. It’s also the first one with an R-rating (17 years and over). And yes, it’s something else.
The story
It’s 2029. Mutants have all but vanished from the world. Logan a.k.a. Wolverine is a drunk ferrying people around as a limo driver. He’s saving up to buy a yacht and sail off with Charles Xavier, who is suffering from a degenerative brain disease.
Things go south for Logan when a woman shows up with a girl called Laura. She is being hunted by Donald Pierce. The woman offers to pay Wolverine a lot of money for smuggling the girl into the US. Logan refuses, but is quickly sucked in anyway.
Things quickly escalate from there.
The characters
This movie doesn’t feature a large cast. The show focuses mostly on Logan, Laura, and Xavier.
Xavier is old and something is eating his mind. Something bad happened a year before the start of the story, but Xavier can’t even remember what. Whatever it was caused the government to classify him as a weapon of mass destruction. He’s still Wolverine’s mentor, but his strength and mind are quickly breaking down.
Xavier’s actions have broken Logan. He’s an alcoholic, actively contemplating suicide. His powers of healing are reaching their limits and his adamantium bones are slowly killing him.
Third is Laura. She doesn’t speak, but she is clearly damaged and Logan is not the best role model to heal her.
Finally, there’s Donald Pierce. He’s a cyborg member of a government organization who hunted down the mutants. It isn’t clear at the beginning what he wants with Laura, but it is clear he’s a very scary dude. What’s brilliant and utterly scary about his depiction is that he’s shown to be interested in meeting Logan and Xavier, but he is also dismissive. He’s not scared of them at all. When they start to get in his way, he casually escalates the violence against them.
R-rated
I’ve seen all of the X-Men movies and read a lot of the comics. Wolverine is an interesting character because he’s more morally grey than Xavier. He was a brainwashed killing machine called Weapon X, but tries to be something more. Still, a guy with six metal claws sticking out of his hands demands a certain violence in his depictions. That never meshed well with the PG-13 rating of the movies.
Enter ‘Logan’. This movie does not pull its punches. Now we finally get to see what those six metal claws can really do. This movie is truly brutal. And that’s just what a Wolverine movie needed. Not only that, the story is very intimate and strong as well. In short, this movie is awesome.
One of my favorite X-men comics is Uncanny X-men 251, which depicts Wolverine tortured by Donald Pierce as he has to watch the remnants of the broken X-Men vanish one by one. It’s a dark chapter that shows just what Wolverine’s about. This movie, although with a different plot, gets as close to this as possible — given the actual comic is the result of a number of pretty complicated storylines.
Conclusion
If you like violent movies with a strong story, like Drive, then you’ll probably like this one.
If you don’t like violence or don’t want to see a darker side of your super heroes,then this movie is not for you.
