"Logan" Drenches Formula In Blood And Guts To Little Effect
Writer-director James Mangold’s second Wolverine movie is both a conspicuous baton-taking from last year’s adult-oriented megahit “Deadpool” (also a 20th Century Fox production) and a calculated mea culpa for 2013’s numbing “The Wolverine.” The result is a vortex of f-words and severed limbs and oh-so-weighty dramaturgy that isn’t just a disingenuous mutation for a once family-friendly franchise. It’s also a crummy way to crown Hugh Jackman’s seventeen mostly thankless years playing the most easily identifiable, crowd-pleasing X-Man.
The film is, above all, a love letter to Jackman. Often laboriously so. It assumes bottomless emotional attachment to both James “Logan” Howlett and Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier (Professor X) on the part of us viewers – a not unreasonable ask considering how many bad X-Men movies we’ve suffered through together – and proceeds to loop us through the emotional wringer. The movie is nothing if not committed to swinging out of its shoes in procurement of twinged heartstrings and many man tears.
And yet, the movie brings with it an enormously bleak story whose efficacy requires a storyteller – not to mention an audience – not too fond of its characters. Thusly, such pervasive, grisly violence carried out by a hero who toes the line of serial murderer is a mighty awkward fit for what ultimately amounts to a Hallmark greeting card to its leading man, signed everyone.
Things start out promisingly enough.
It’s 2029 and mutants are more personae non gratae than ever. Logan resides in a dusty, dystopian version of the American Southwest. His indestructability has begun to betray him. The metal alloy (Adamantium) inside his body – the same compound responsible for his claw-wielding, regenerative superpowers – is eating him alive, reducing the once unbreakable “Weapon X” to a graying, depressive shell. His nights are spent chauffeuring people around El Paso, his days across the Mexican border tending to a similarly deteriorating Charles Xavier. Xavier’s particular neurodegenerative disorder results in catastrophic, Earth-shaking seizures if not properly medicated.
In a shrewd bit of casting, British comedian Stephen Merchant plays Xavier’s albino mutant caregiver Caliban. The actor lends a sense of volatility and at least the possibility of levity to early scenes. As the action begins to ramp up, we can’t help but be invested in this oddball trio; not necessarily out of deep-seated affection, but because the odds seem so stacked against them.
The first few action beats are pleasantly intense, significantly but not egregiously upping the series’ ante. But soon the magnitude of the bloodshed sets in. That a child is at the center of it. That Mangold and his co-writers have barely nicked the surface.
From here on in, the broad strokes of “Logan” follow those of last year’s sci-fi drama “Midnight Special” (itself not an especially innovative film), centered on a few adults on the run with a supernaturally gifted youngster. Here, those adults are Logan and Charles, the child a pre-teen Mexican orphan named Laura (Dafne Keen), code name X-23. She is the result of especially cruel multinational genetic experimentation. She is also a clone daughter of Logan, every bit as mistreated by the world, every bit as capable of decapitating bad guys with her retractable claws.
Boyd Holbrook (“A Walk Among The Tombstones”) co-stars as the leader of the beheaded-to-be. He delivers his dialogue with a southern drawl as to underline the movie’s pained, self-made parallels to 1953 western “Shane,” his character never rising above generic mercenary. The screenplay’s real conflict is, after all, inside of Logan, with our protagonist battling old age and mortality and thoughts of suicide. For one last act of act of relative heroism, he’ll attempt to save a sliver of himself (X-23) by transporting her to a mutant safe haven that may or may not exist.
You might be thinking, “Inner conflict sounds terribly low key for a superhero movie,” and you would be right. At a loss for how to string out Logan’s internal torment to feature length, Mangold’s creative team seemingly asked themselves, “What’s the most senseless way to translate internal conflict to the external world?” They find their answer in a literal copy of Wolverine, slightly de-aged, dropping him into their story to murder hordes of innocents and then fight Logan to the death.
The picture’s final stretch makes a dedicated crack at topping the stupidity of the climax of “The Wolverine.” Mutant children run feebly through a forest doing magical computer-generated things (like using their super-powered breath on heavily-armed thugs) that animators have made only slightly more convincing. Meanwhile, Logan fights the aforementioned copy of himself, grunting and slashing his way to a denouement so darkly sentimental as to ensure theaters full of tear-streaked beards.
All of this gloom and doom makes the universally mocked “Batman V Superman” seem absolutely rosy by comparison. For so much deadly serious bloodletting, there is strikingly little talk of what it means. Logan tells X-23 she must learn to live with the killing, but leaves it there, as if his mid-movie slaughtering of incapacitated thugs was justified by saving an old man on the verge of death.
As the author of conventional genre fare like “Walk The Line” and “3:10 To Yuma,” James Mangold has made his living in the middle of the road. As such, the one-noted-ness of “Logan” should come as no surprise. What comes as an enormous surprise is how highly a second-rate road movie and slasher hybrid seems to regard itself. The same thing was efforted ten times more effectively by video game developer Naughty Dog just four years ago. Their masterpiece “The Last Of Us” (yet another better thing that “Logan” cribs from) stands tall above everything else in the subgenre, no matter the medium. Over “Logan,” it towers.
This particular iteration of Marvel Comics’ Wolverine and his movie exist purely to engage in masturbatory violence and then make viewers weepy – and not even through any invention of Mangold and his writers. There is nothing noteworthy about anyone’s work here, except for the geysers of crimson and four-letter words, each hastily ladled on as transparent fan wish fulfillment.
Marvel fans that moonlight as undiscerning gorehounds just might find Valhalla in “Logan,” but the project goes out of its way to give everyone else the cold, dead shoulder.
-J. Olson
Rating: ★★ out of ★★★★★ (Not So Good)
Release Date: March 3, 2017
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Director: James Mangold
Screenwriter: James Mangold, Scott Frank, Michael Green
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Stephen Merchant, Boyd Holbrook, Dafne Keen
MPAA Rating: R (for strong brutal violence and language throughout, and for brief nudity)
“…but the project goes out of its way to give everyone else the cold, dead shoulder.”
Numbers would prove otherwise, but thanks for this bloated mess of a review. Take up a new hobby for our sake. Please.
I must have blacked out for a second and forgot that box office numbers prove a film’s worth. My mistake.
You couldn’t think of a valid reply so come back with irrelevant, awkward deflection?
David quoted you regarding how non-marvel fans got the cold shoulder. The box office proves your assumption 100% incorrect. Box office success= a films worth… Literally.
We get it. You love arthouse, 3mil budget films. Nothing else provides any “worth” to the art of cinema
Actually yes. The huge box office numbers and overwhelmingly positive reviews do prove that nearly everyone likes this movie.
Which, again yes, makes your negative review wrong.
No, his negative review makes it just that: a negative review. Leave the issue of wrongness of opinion for church.
Look at Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise for an example of tripe movies that rake in large box office numbers.
This movie is a step in the right direction for a character like Wolverine, but it isn’t without it’s flaws. It simply is the better movie in relation to previous Wolverine outings.
Actually, Hermit, Zero is correct. J. Olson outright stated that non-Marvel fans were given the cold shoulder, which would imply that non-Marvel fans did not like the movie. That is an outright lie. The film is not just doing well at the box office. The film is critically acclaimed. 92% of J. Olson’s critic peers, which include many top critics who are far more respected than him, disagree with him and give the film a good rating. On top of that, Logan has a high audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (93%) and movie goers currently have it rated 8.6 on imdb after nearly 150,000 reviews. I personally love the movie and am not a Marvel fan, and every single person I know who saw it felt it was profound and one of the best comic book films ever made. Therefore, I think it is safe to say that J. Olson flat out lied in his review. That is beyond just stating a minority opinion. That is wrong.
LMAO!!! You are completely right dude, and I am a huge Wolverine fan(Tattoos and Toys). This movie sucked. The plot was unfulfilling, and contrary to your piece I thought the action and gore were lacking. X23 was the only character of worth and Dafne Keen had the only performance of note.
Must say that I completely agree with this review. I could not wait for this overlong mess to end.
Actually, this review is right on target. It’s kinda sad that you let others do you thinking for you…
I for one agree wholeheartedly. Logan was not an innovative movie. It was not an enjoyable movie (what with the gratuitous decapitations and limb-loss). What’s the point of making a movie R if the result only includes unnecessary blood, more uses of fuck than you can count, and one pair of boobs? A pair of boobs barely on screen long enough to make parents frantically throw their hands over their youngsters eyes only to realize by the time they covered the kid’s face, the nudity was off-screen. It’s like they had a (already mediocre) script for a PG-13 outing of Logan, but then some higher up saw Deadpool’s success and had an epiphany! Logan MUST be R! But the writer’s being lazy and just generally bad at their job decided the best course of action was to just throw in enough nonsense just to get that R rating from the MPAA, called it a day, and when and got some beers. Speaking of beer, that’s one thing I probably could have used after sitting through this hyper-violent love letter to Mr. Jackman.
Your comment convinces me that you did not actually see the film. Either that, or we did not watch the same film – or perhaps you were already so biased going into it that you were going to consider the violence and profanity gratuitous no matter what. Thankfully, for the majority of us viewers, we recognized that the violence in the film was anything but gratuitous and we have multiple reasons why we can defend that argument. I’m not one to try to change someone’s opinion about art, however, so I won’t even bother. Good day.
You spent more time in your comment dismissing my opinion out of hand than actually trying to convince me otherwise; weak argument perhaps? And I was not at all biased against it. I have thoroughly enjoyed every Wolverine outing up until this point and completely expected to enjoy Logan going into the theater. However, once inside the movie quickly began to disappoint. Please regale me with your multiple reasons to defend to not-at-all unnecessary blood and guts? Tell me how the Star Wars-esque limb loss added to the overall cinematic experience..
There’s not really any such thing as a “wrong” opinion.. but this review sure does have a whiff of someone deliberately trying to be contrarian because he thinks it will make him look cooler than if he agrees with all the other critics, who overwhelmingly praised this flick.
I agree with the Claw. This review seems to be trying really hard to find something wrong with this film.
I can understand why some people may not enjoy this movie. If you’re expecting a typical superhero movie then yes, this will film will disappoint. There isn’t the expected heroic stand where everything turns out ok.
But that doesn’t mean this is a bad film. Quite the contrary. This movie is realistic look at what would happen if superheroes did exist but they aged just like the rest of us. What happens when they have to battle dementia or chronic pain? How would they cope? And what would that even look like? The answer is they would have to navigate life like so many millions of people in similar situations – they have to rely heavily on their loved ones and at times have to resort to self medication (whether through pharmaceutical drugs or alcohol).
And like many people who know their time on this earth is limited the characters in this film reflect back on their life with regret and sadness.
So no, this is not a superhero movie although there are superheoes in the film. It’s a drama that doesn’t shy away from the violence of the situation.
If you go into the movie with that framework in mind I imagine you would appreciate what the director was trying to accomplish, even if you ultimately end up disliking the film.
Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart are amazing in this film. Throughout the movie you can feel the pain Wolverine is dealing with and yes, it is uncomfortable. There is a brief moment where the character is able to escape the pain and the audience amazingly feels the same relief. It really is a shame this is viewed as a”superhero” movie because Hugh Jackman deserves an Oscar nomination for his performance.
Similarly, Patrick Stewart does an amazing job depicting what it is like to be cognizant of the fact your mind is failing you.
This movie is difficult to watch at times because of the raw emotions both actors bring to the screen. But that by no means makes this a bad movie. Quite the opposite. It’s what distinguishes this film from every other “superhero” movie made to date.
A great review. Yes it’s contrarian, and has to make a case against the overwhelming herd-instinct of RT film critics (Moonlight anyone?) But it makes a good case and gets to the nub of the film: we’re watching a bloodbath for no reason except we’ve paid to watch a bloodbath. It really is senseless and silly. It should have remained family-friendly because caper/thriller is its medium; we should never have to deal with the pretension of this kind of schlock taking itself seriously. The film has a good early vibe in the smelter, and some nice and unexpected slow pacing when they stay overnight with the horse-farmers, and some thoughtful one-liners. But it all qualifies as ‘good’ only because the premise of the movie itself is so dumb. It’s slasher porn and makes me queasy to have kids witness this stuff. If this is really the best Hugh Jackman has made of his career, he’s wasted it.
You are funny guys. Saying this movie is just “a slasher porn” is idiotic in my opinion. You forget about more important stuff this movie has to offer, which are emotional scenes. Heck, the whole movie is about making the viewer emotional. THAT is why this movie can be considered beautiful. You may not like R-Rating, but don’t tell that it was not required for this movie to exist.
Just thought I would mention that the adamantium in Logan’s body has nothing to do with his healing powers. His mutant power was his ability to heal at a rapid rate, and not age much, if at all. The adamantium was bonded to his skeleton in the 1970’s by a deranged military man, William Stryker. Before this procedure Wolverine’s claws were made of bone.
I just watched it after all the rave reviews, and I was really looking forward to it. Maybe my expectations were too high. I agree with J. Olson here. The movie works way too hard to demonstrate the heavy and cruel fates of our heroes, and it left me cold. I’m a Marvel fan, I’m a Wolverine fan, and I’m a fan of superhero movies daring to be different, hell, I’m even a fan of dystopian movies but I felt more emotion for the characters in the gaudy coloured fun-ride of Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and vol.2 than in this deliberately doom-ridden mess. I get the feeling that most of the rave reviews don’t see past the ‘oh my God, they killed Kenny’, sorry, Wolverine and ‘wow, dr. X has Alzheimers’ and translate that into ‘death and senility = real life problems = good movie’.
Most of the cast was gored, I was bored. But I do think that Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Merchant and newcomer Dafne Keen turn in stellar performances. They deserved a better movie with some real heart in it and not this calculated man-tear jerker.
Hello there J. Olsen
Your review was quite interesting to read so was your comments. It seems that you are a man who as a very artistic and analytic mind. I understand your thinking towards the movie how it doesn’t live up to expectations and all that. I agree with your thinking it is in fact rather bleak and disappointing. The truth is my dear Olsen is that Logan was never suppose to feel like it was good or artistic, it’s a slap in the face that represents what reality is. The realism of the blood and gore is what life is really about. If you looked at the fight scenes you can see that theres NOTHING heroic or awesome about the fight scenes. They are just there because it’s what needs to happen, also they seem pretty dirty and short just like real life. I just want you to understand, that life ain’t always debatable. How I see it you just really didn’t like the movie because you can’t fully understand it, your mind is too engulfed with your own pride you can’t see further then your own thinking. Your review was interesting, but at the core you wrote mostly what you thought was right. Have a good day and next time you write a review be sure to know all the facts and both sides of the story.
Agree with the review . I read comics including Millar’s Old Man Logan and this movie has not of the enjoyment I got from those comics . It is just a horror show . Really stupid film .