- UK release: March 2017
- Director: James Mangold · Writers: Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
- Studio / distributor: 20th Century Fox; Marvel Entertainment; TSG Entertainment
- Genre: Superhero western / dystopian action drama · Runtime: 137 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Hugh Jackman (X-Men, The Prestige) as Logan / Wolverine; Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: First Contact, X-Men) as Charles Xavier; Dafne Keen as Laura / X-23; Boyd Holbrook (Gone Girl, A Walk Among the Tombstones) as Donald Pierce
- IMDb: 8.1 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 93% critics / 90% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Seventeen years after he first popped his claws in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, Hugh Jackman has decided he is done with Wolverine, and James Mangold has built him a send-off that looks almost nothing like the films that came before. There have been nine of these now, of wildly variable quality, and the character has rarely been served by them; X-Men Origins: Wolverine in particular treated him as a franchise asset to be wheeled out and merchandised. Logan does the opposite. It strips the spandex, the team, the world-saving and most of the budget’s worth of spectacle, and asks what is left of a man who heals from everything except age and grief. The answer turns out to be a western.
The setup
It is 2029, and mutants have all but vanished. Logan is greying, limping and drinking, working as a limo driver on the Texas border and keeping a terrible secret across the line in Mexico: a ruined, dementia-stricken Charles Xavier, the most powerful brain on the planet and now a danger to everyone near him when it misfires. Logan is saving for a boat, a way to take the two of them out of reach of the world. Into this careful, failing arrangement walks a young girl, Laura, silent and feral and pursued by a cybernetic enforcer called Donald Pierce and the corporate outfit behind him. She is, it becomes clear, very like Logan, and getting her north and clear of her hunters becomes the last job he has left in him.
The cast
Jackman has played this role longer than most actors hold any part, and the performance here is the payoff for all of it. The healing is slowing, the body is breaking, and he plays Logan as a man in constant, weary pain, which is something the earlier films never had room for. Patrick Stewart is the quiet devastation of the piece. His Xavier, once the franchise’s serene moral centre, is now frightened, foul-mouthed and lucid only in flashes, and Stewart commits to that indignity completely. Between them they turn a superhero film into a study of two old men failing. Dafne Keen, barely a teenager, is the discovery; her Laura is mostly wordless, all coiled fury and watchfulness, and she holds the screen against both of them. Boyd Holbrook’s Pierce is a smiling, drawling company man, the right kind of antagonist for a film this grounded.
The craft
Mangold, who made the underrated 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line, directs this as a road movie and a western before he directs it as a comic-book film, and the references are worn openly: there is a long stretch built around Shane, screened and quoted, that tells you exactly what kind of story this wants to be. The violence is the other departure. Freed by an R rating, the action is brutal and bloody in a way the 12A entries never were, claws going through skulls, and it lands with weight because the film makes you feel every wound. The Texas and prairie landscapes are shot wide and bleached, the score is sparse, and the pacing is patient where the genre usually sprints. It is a film confident enough to slow down, sit at a dinner table and let you dread what is coming.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparisons are not other superhero films at all. The clearest is Unforgiven, another story of an ageing killer dragged back to violence he thought he had left behind, and the elegiac tone is pure late-period western. There is Children of Men in the bleached, depopulated near-future and the structure of escorting a precious child through a dying world. Against the X-Men films, it is a rebuke: where The Wolverine, Mangold’s own first go at the character, pulled its punches in the final act, this one keeps its nerve. Logan as a brawling franchise mascot is gone. What is left is closer to Mad Max with a soul, a chase across a wasted landscape with stakes that feel personal rather than apocalyptic.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have embraced it almost without reservation, sitting at 93%, with audiences close behind at 90%, and for once the consensus and the crowd agree on why: this is the rare superhero film that earns the word mature without using it as an excuse for grimness. The praise lands on Jackman, Stewart and Mangold’s western framing, and it is deserved. My own reaction tracks the enthusiasm with one reservation, and it is about rewatchability. This is a heavy, sad, deliberately exhausting film, and films I love to return to tend to have more air in them. Brilliant is not always the same as something you reach for on a wet Sunday.
Verdict
This is the best film the X-Men franchise has produced and one of the few superhero films that works fully as a drama with the costumes removed. The performances are excellent, the western bones are real rather than borrowed for flavour, and Mangold has the discipline to let a blockbuster be quiet and cruel and human. It loses a fraction with me only on the rewatch axis, because the bleakness that makes it powerful also makes it a film I admire more than I want to revisit. As a send-off for a character seventeen years in the making, it could hardly be bettered. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, certificate 15. Worth seeing on the big screen for the landscapes alone.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: a black-and-white cut, Logan Noir, followed into cinemas and onto disc, and it suits the film’s western austerity even better than the colour version. Dafne Keen’s Laura went on to anchor her own corner of the franchise, and the picture has settled firmly into its reputation as the high-water mark for the X-Men films and a touchstone for what a serious superhero film can be. It is now widely available on disc and digital and streams on Disney+ in most regions.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong bloody violence, strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are scenes of strong bloody violence which include shootings and the use of a harpoon. Some of the violence features Wolverine and another mutant using blades that are part of their physiologies to slash and stab enemies. The sequences of violence are rapidly-edited, with a focus on action. The violence is frequently bloody and there is occasional sight of injury detail in its aftermath.
Language: There is strong language (‘fk’, ‘motherfker’), as well as milder terms including ‘shit’, ‘bullshit’, ‘dick’, ‘dickhead’, ‘ass’ and ‘asshole’.
Additional issues: There is also brief female breast nudity.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
