Logan - The Perfect X-Men Movie

it's no secret that i've always had kind of a love-hate relationship with the x-men series on the one hand it's given us truly awesome movies like x2 and days of future past but on the other it's shouts out creative disasters like the last stand x-men origins wolverine apocalypse and dark phoenix it's certainly been a rocky road but i think most people would agree that one of the best things to come out of this mess was hugh jackman's wolverine yeah he didn't always have the best scripts to work with and he's about a foot taller than his comic book counterparts but there was just something fundamentally cool and awesome about the guy he really seemed to take the role seriously no matter what was asked of him and he was clearly prepared to put in the work to get into wolverine's shape the fact that he's in almost every x-men movie should tell you just how much the studio relied on him to get rc's into seats but all good things have to come to an end and after 17 years and eight film appearances hugh jackman was ready to hang up the claws he was almost 50 years old and came to move on to new projects but he was willing to give wolverine one last outing and when he began looking at ideas for where to take the character it wasn't long before the old man logan's storyline rose to the top working with writer and director james mangold jackman fought hard to make this film different from everything that had come before it he wanted it to be grounded gritty and character focused instead of some big special effects monstrosity and he even took a hefty pick up to secure an r rating and [ __ ] man did his gamble pay off logan is quite possibly the best x-men movie ever made and i'd argue it's one of the strongest comic book adaptations of all time delivering a perfect send-off for one of the most popular superhero characters in cinema allow me to explain why the movie kicks off in the year 2029 where an aging logan is eking out a living as a limo driver making just enough money to care for a dying professor xavier as the man sees out his final days xavier's suffering from dementia which means he's slowly losing control of his powerful psychic abilities and has to be kept sedated to stop him from turning into a psychic time bomb right from the start it's pretty obvious this is going to be a very different movie from the colorful action-packed x-men films we've been used to the world of logan is a bleak lonely sun-bleached kind of place where no mutants have been born in decades and even the mighty x-men are nothing but a distant memory relegated to the pages of dusty comic books even logan himself is starting to break down his body covered with the scars of old battles and is once superhuman healing ability now slow and painful it turns out that his adamantium skeleton is slowly poisoning him and now that his healing abilities are fading the poison is starting to get the better of him basically logan is a man living on borrowed time and he knows it but he's given a new sense of purpose when he's recruited to drive a young girl named laura to a sanctuary called eden why because laura's being hunted she's a mutant with powers and abilities similar to his own the first new mutant born in decades as we soon find out laura and a bunch of other children like her were created in a lab by an evil company that wanted to weaponize them because you know there's always an evil company that wants to exploit mutants in these movies when the experiments didn't pan out the company planned to execute the children but some of the nurses disobeyed orders and smuggled them out now they want to kill laura to cover up the truth of their experiments and they'll stop at nothing to get to her and when they track logan back to his hideout in the desert he's left with no choice but to take her in xavier and get the [ __ ] out of there so the bulk of the story is a kind of road trip movie and a chase thriller combined as the trio make their way north to eden hunted by corporate mercenaries every step of the way there's plenty of gory action and fight scenes to be sure but it's in the quieter moments that the film really shines through for me at its heart logan is a character study about three very different people thrown together and forced to cooperate in order to survive whether it's the gangs slowly opening up to each other as they travel through a bleak desolate future america or having dinner with a family that took them in for the night simple moments like this really are a joy to watch the chemistry between the three main actors is [ __ ] perfect patrick stewart and hugh jackman have been playing these roles for so long that they could practically perform them in their sleep but this movie may represent their very best work their performances are poignant understated and mature especially stuart who plays a once proud man struggling to accept that his mind is failing him with all the bravado and pretenses of previous movies stripped away what you're left with are two old men haunted by past mistakes and regrets and facing the realization that there aren't that many days ahead for either of them it's kind of ironic that their greatest strengths have become their most fatal weaknesses logan's adamantium skeleton that made him all but indestructible is now slowly killing him while xavier's psychic ability makes him a living weapon as he slowly loses control of it daphne keane also does a great job as laura managing to portray a character that can be both dangerous and vulnerable depending on the situation child actors are always a bit of a gamble especially when the movie demands a lot from them but she absolutely delivers when she needs to and the growing relationship between her and logan represents the emotional heart of the film after spending most of his life fighting and killing just to survive logan is absolutely not father material but like everything else in this movie it's the story of a deeply flawed man doing his best with what he has the climax of the movie sees an exhausted logan and laura reunite with the other children who escaped the lab as they prepare to cross over the border into the relative safety of canada but the evil corporate guys aren't about to let them get away and intercept them just as they're about to escape that leaves logan with no choice but to make his last stand taking an overdose of drugs to temporarily restore his strength and healing and damn what a [ __ ] scene this is after an entire movie watching a diminished logan struggle just to keep up and do the things he used to find so easy it's glorious to see him go into full-on berserker mode one last time carving his way through [ __ ] everything in his path forcing himself to keep moving forward even as the drugs begin to wear off and his injuries mounts up and at last coming face to face with his greatest enemy of all himself this isn't the unstoppable superhuman creature that could withstand anything the world could throw at him this is a tired wounded man at the limits of his strength and the end of his time given everything he has left to protect people he barely knows willing to lay down his life for the daughter he never knew it's the perfect swan song for a man that was always defined by the struggle between the selfish and heroic sides of his nature never quite sure who he was meant to be or what path he was meant to walk but in the end redeeming himself in the most selfless way possible given his life so that others can have a chance at theirs the movie ends with laura and the other children laying him to rest in a peaceful forest the last of the x-men to fall just as he was the first to rise for me logan is pretty much the definitive wolverine movie and the best possible resolution for one of the most popular comic book characters of all time yeah the plot isn't exactly complex there's no shocking twists unexpected revelations or some grand battle for the fate of the planet but it doesn't need to be complex logan tells a simpler more grounded and heartfelt kind of story that reminds me of all those old westerns about aging gunslingers pulled into one last adventure before going out in a blaze of glory and to be honest i think that's exactly what they were going for here hugh jackman made a very smart choice by going with the old man logan's storyline not many actors get to say goodbye to their most iconic role in a way that feels so dramatically and emotionally complete but he did because he was savvy enough to recognize that his wolverine had reached the end of his road and it was time to bow out gracefully a different actor might have stuck around for a couple more movies trying to milk the success of the wolverine and days of future past but jackman was smart enough to go out on a high one of my big concerns going into this movie was how well a grounded r-rated film like logan would handle the more outlandish aspects of the x-men universe but the movie manages to walk a difficult path between acknowledging past events without getting bogged down in the convoluted x-men timeline and you never really get the feeling that it's trying to mock or belittle previous movies it's content to tell its own story that's largely separate from the rest of the x-men universe but it does so in a smart respectful way that honors the past instead of trying to bury it and thinking about logan in retrospect i can't help but wonder what could have been if only the studio had had the balls to take this kind of risk a decade earlier imagine if the two previous wolverine movies had been gritty and r-rated and helmed by competent directors with a coherent storyline in minds it could have been one of the best superhero trilogies ever in reality what we got was one shitty film that everyone involved with would rather forget one that was halfway decent but kind of irrelevant and a final chapter that blew both of them out of the water and i suppose that sentiment pretty much sums up the x-men franchise as a whole and always came across as kind of chaotic and haphazard like they were literally making it up as they went along and the result was a franchise that tried to do a bit of everything with varying degrees of success like a failed attempt to give each character their own origin movie or jumping 40 years into the past to fill in previous events with a younger cast of actors or a time travel plot to unite past and present and fix some of the [ __ ] ups of previous movies or some weird horror spin-off series with yet another new cast or another attempt to make the dark phoenix storyline happen the x-men series really has tried it all and to be honest it's probably failed more often than it succeeded but somehow i can never quite bring myself to hate it because i recognize that it all had to be done without any kind of guide or framework the x-men seemed to be making things up as they went along because well most of the time they were the slicker smarter and more accessible mcu would eventually eclipse their success and i think it's fair to say that marvel learned a lot from the x-men's mistakes but this was still the franchise that paved the way for it and i guess it deserves respect and recognition for that i only wish logan had been the final triumphant movie to cap it all off instead of the ridiculous embarrassment of dark phoenix and the pointless damp squib that was new mutants but never mind none of that should diminish the fact that even if it came a decade late logan proved that they finally figured out how to do wolverine justice anyway that's all i've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

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Id: 2i6WT4QTfic

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021