LOGAN : Official Reviews (Spoiler Alert)

[jo]

So far --

TOMATOMETER

95%
Average Rating: 8.1/10
Reviews Counted: 61
Fresh: 58
Rotten: 3


Critics Consensus: Hugh Jackman makes the most of his final outing as Wolverine with a gritty, nuanced performance in a violent but surprisingly thoughtful superhero action film that defies genre conventions.

Many reviews are still to come in. The current pace is probably only around 25 % or what is expected. However, Rotten Tomatoes has already established the general consensus of critics based on current sample.

[jo]

What is the Tomatometer®?

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From the Critics

Fresh
The Tomatometer is 60% or higher.

Rotten
The Tomatometer is 59% or lower.

Certified Fresh
Movies and TV shows are Certified Fresh with a steady Tomatometer of 75% or higher after a set amount of reviews (80 for wide-release movies, 40 for limited-release movies, 20 for TV shows), including 5 reviews from Top Critics.


From RT Users Like You!
Audience Score
Percentage of users who rate a movie or TV show positively.

If only the next 25 or so reviews would come in now -- maybe LOGAN will get a CERTIFIED FRESH RATING even before the movie opens!

[jo]

I am not sure if Harry Knowles ( he runs AICN, the fanboy favorite filmsite) writes critiques that qualify for inclusion in the Tomatometer -- but :

Harry Knowles
Verified account
‏@headgeek666 2h
2 hours ago


I'm not even kidding when I say, I'd love to see Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart pull nominations for Best Actor & Sup Actor for LOGAN 2018

Here is his review ( you'll have to pardon his tapestry of expletives ) --

www.aintitcool.com/node/77284

[mamaleh]

To say Knowles is enthusiastic is the understatement of the year. Wow. From his computer keyboard to AMPAS's ears (so to speak).

Ellen

[jo]

Even the very strict compilation by METACRITIC of select reviews gives a nod to LOGAN. Among the 14 films in competition and out of competition reviewed from the Berlinale, LOGAN is ranked # 5!

www.metacritic.com/pictures/2017-berlinale-reviews-best-films?ref=hp

[jo]

It is still a trickle of incoming reviews but the rating is sustained --

TOMATOMETER

95%
Average Rating: 8.1/10
Reviews Counted: 65
Fresh: 62
Rotten: 3

I wonder why many of the reviews are being held up? There were so many screenings that it is easy to assume that many media and film critics have had a chance to see it.

The critic for rogerebert.com has already hinted how pleased he is with the film...but will not release his review till February 27!

[jo]

This review from Quint of Ain't It Cool News ( not to be confused with the writeup of Harry Knowles) is a love letter to the movie and the major cast! It is especially poignant because Quint attributes the excellence of this movie to Hugh's enduring legacy of 17 years developing the film character of Wolverine!

www.aintitcool.com/node/77303?utm_source=full-feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_term=coolnews&utm_campaign=1310_RSS

I wish Hugh would read the reviews -- they are testaments to the wonderful work he has put into this passion project, with the help of James Mangold!


JO

[jo]

Another eloquent review! It sounds like it was written with a full understanding of the character of Wolverine and his relationship with the Professor.

Logan review: Hugh Jackman ditches superhero silliness for ultraviolent, dystopian drama

Stephen Merchant, Dafne Keen and Patrick Stewart also star in emotional James Mangold-directed movie.

By Amy West
February 23, 2017 16:43 GMT


Logan


How many times have you returned home from seeing an X-Men movie and genuinely felt sad that you will never have the abilities of some of the characters you've witnessed? Be honest, it's probably happened more often that not.
Now, ignore the fact that that's really embarrassing and think about why that is... It's because all of the previous X-Men-based films have been solely about showcasing their superhero powers. Regardless of story, that's always been the consistent theme and arguably, audiences went in thinking that's what they wanted.

For as much as Jean Grey's arc and Magneto's tragic past had us mildly invested, the series as a whole never quite went dark enough for us to feel the crushing emotional weight that was hidden beneath the stories. Fortunately, Logan is bold enough to take a very different approach;  there's a reason it's named after his human alter-ego rather than his more comic-book related title.

Throughout the entire franchise, Logan – the character – has never been able to shirk off his feelings of guilt, isolation and ongoing reluctance to be a hero. As much as he tries to pretend he's all animal instinct and nothing more, he's probably the most fragile of the bunch deep-down. It's always been those complex qualities that have made him one of Marvel's more interesting figures and Mangold explores those personal themes more than ever here.


Set in 2029, the film sees Logan working as a driver-for-hire and living a humdrum, lonely life on the Mexican border, following the mysterious disappearance of almost all other mutants. In his downtime, he cares for telepath Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who is succumbing to the effects of a neurodegenerative disease and causes everyone within a mile-or-so radius to paralyse every time he suffers from a seizure.

The broken pair are simply waiting things out, until the bitter end finally comes around and puts them both out of their misery. After all, there's no point fighting the inevitable, Xavier is 90-years-old and Logan is slowly being poisoned by the adamantium inside of him. His wounds no longer heal and his claws ooze all sorts of bodily fluids whenever he's forced to use them. Basically, it's not looking good. 

But their hard yet seemingly-quiet life is threatened when their paths cross with Laura (Dafne Keen), a young mutant who's more like Logan than he would care to admit. Before long, the trio find themselves embroiled in a dangerous cross-country manhunt, as they try to save Laura from the relentless pursuits of a menacing corporation lead by the annoyingly-caricature-like evil scientist Dr Rice (Richard E Grant).


Anyone who's remotely familiar with the X-Men movies will know that Logan frequently refers to Xavier
as 'professor' throughout the series. It's always been indicative of him keeping his mentor at arm's length and simultaneously, a way of allowing writers to show that Logan isn't interested in forging close relationships. It's also been a way of showcasing Xavier's authority over him too. He doesn't use the phrase once in Logan. 
There's frustrated desperation whenever Logan urges Xavier to take his medication and intimacy every time he calls him 'Charles'; knowing that he no longer has the self-confidence to help them. Finally, these two long-standing characters have their walls completely stripped down and this exploration of their bond and mutual understanding of the darkness that they've seen together is incredibly engaging. 

Similarly, Xavier – who was always a beacon of hope for his former students, encouraging them to be proud of their powers and use them in the best way possible, is changed. And we're not just talking about his new-found potty mouth... Here, his crippling shame over not being able to save all of his fellow mutants permeates all of his scenes, culminating in a heartbreaking confession that will almost definitely make your eyes water.
Along with fantastic new addition Keen, these characters don't just make up a superhuman team, they're more of an unconventional family unit by the second act, and because of that, the stakes feels exponentially upped as the film draws to a close. The entire world doesn't need saving here; it's more about Logan's personal journey and his final attempt at finding peace within himself. (Which is why the movie's final fight scene – or moreover, who Wolverine is forced to go up against - winds up being borderline poetic). What's more is you're not quite sure just what his search is going to cost him along the way.


Mangold isn't only bold when it comes to pushing emotional boundaries too. Wolverine has always been regarded as the most savage of X-Men members and rightly so; collapsing someone to the ground with your mind or giving them a swift kick round the head doesn't exactly look as harrowing on-screen as slashing a torso with a set of knife-like claws. But Wolverine's fight scenes have always been muted given his previous outings' child-friendly certificates. 

Now, with a R-rating in tow, Mangold delivers on his promise of ultra-violence. Heads get decapitated and punctured, limbs get sliced off and there's shredded bloody bodies by the bucket-load. Most of the time, the deaths aren't purely in the name of justice either. Sometimes, they're merely the result of unadulterated rage.


To say Logan is the best Wolverine film is to do it a disservice – (the two that have come before it have hardly been ground-breaking) – it's undoubtedly one of the best comic-book films going. Calling it a superhero movie doesn't quite seem fitting either, as it wholeheartedly abandons formulaic traditions, that need to tease a sequel and that cape-filled, cheesy glossiness in favour of something much more universal; a truly affecting and gritty human story. 

[jo]

Update -- I really cannot understand why RT is taking its sweet time publishing the reviews ( we're still only around 30% of all potential reviews) --

TOMATOMETER

96%

Average Rating: 8.1/10
Reviews Counted: 71
Fresh: 68
Rotten: 3

[hughmanity]

I've noticed that most newspapers publish much later.  I'm speculating perhaps because of the fact that they are "dailies" and the publishers tend to not give up much of their content far in advance.  Still, I'm getting antsy to read them too!

Feb 23, 2017 18:52:49 GMT -5 jo said:

Update -- I really cannot understand why RT is taking its sweet time publishing the reviews ( we're still only around 30% of all potential reviews) --

TOMATOMETER

96%

Average Rating: 8.1/10
Reviews Counted: 71
Fresh: 68
Rotten: 3

[jo]

Slowly ( very) but surely, the overall rating continues to sit still at 96%

TOMATOMETER

96%
Average Rating: 8.1/10
Reviews Counted: 74
Fresh: 71
Rotten: 3

The reasons why fans want to see the ratings come in as soon as possible :

*The highest-rated comicbook movies are THE DARK KNIGHT and THE AVENGERS at 94%; fans are excited to know if LOGAN will be able to maintain its current rating level, so as to make it the best-rated comicbook movie of all time!

*On Rotten Tomatoes a movie that gets an average rating of at least 75% for at least 80 reviews with at least 5 favorable reviews from Top Critics will get their highest accolade called CERTIFIED FRESH. Fans are keen to see LOGAN get this accolade even before it releases in its largest market ( the USA) on March 3! That will expand its appeal even further as the RT ratings are very well-recognized as a gauge of film quality.


Jo

[jo]

From rogerbert.com -- one of the most definitive appreciation of LOGAN as a great film!

Logan (2017)

|  Brian Tallerico
February 27, 2017   |  


Is “Logan” more powerful because of what the superhero genre has delivered over the last decade? Does it seem both groundbreaking and classic because it doesn’t feel like a modern superhero movie, especially those with the Marvel brand? Don’t worry. I’m not going to dissect the flaws of the Marvel and DC brands, but it’s undeniable that the modern superhero movie has relied on CGI, particularly in final acts comprised almost entirely of apocalyptic explosions. And so many of them have served as bridges between franchise entries that one feels like they’re constantly watching previews for the next movie instead of experiencing the one they’re watching. “Logan” has stakes that feel real, and fight choreography that’s fluid and gorgeous instead of just computer-generated effects. Most importantly, “Logan” has characters with which you identify and about whom you care. It's not just "great for a superhero movie," it's a great movie for any genre.


“Logan” calls back directly to “Shane,” including a scene in which the characters watch the film, but it has more echoes of late-career films for icons such as “The Shootist” and “Unforgiven” in the way it deconstructs the line between hero and legend. Logan (Hugh Jackman) is a Western archetype, the gunslinger forced to put away his six-shooters and try to live out his days as routinely as possible. In the world of “Logan,” The Uncanny X-Men comics exist, meaning that Logan/Wolverine is like a retired sports hero or celebrity, someone who’s recognized but no longer really essential. It is 2029 and mutants have been removed from the human bloodline, meaning that the creaky Logan and the nonagenarian Professor X (Patrick Stewart) are the end of an era. Or are they?


When the film opens, Logan is laying low, working as a driver. He’s introduced sleeping in his car, as a group of tough guys try to steal his tires. When he attempts to stop them, he gets shot, but we all know bullets don’t do much to Wolverine, and it’s minutes before his Adamantium claws are slicing through skull and bone in ways we’ve never seen on film before. Not only is “Logan” the first R-rated iteration of this classic character but Mangold’s approach to action is unique for the Marvel film brand. Gone is any sense of hyperactive editing or wide overhead shots to disguise the stunt and CGI work. We’re close to the action in this film, often shot from low to the ground, more like a “Bourne” film than a superhero movie, and the focus is more on fight choreography than editing. Jackman’s work in the fight scenes is smooth but also character-driven in that Wolverine’s style reflects the no-nonsense approach of the character. “Logan” also works in a few fantastic chase scenes later in the film, and again it doesn’t feel like the film stops and takes a break for set pieces as so many superhero movies do—the action is organic to the story and the characters, much like “Mad Max: Fury Road” in that regard.


“Logan” shares more than just an action style with George Miller’s film for it too becomes a road movie when Logan, Professor X, and a mysterious girl (Dafne Keen) head out to try and find 'Eden,' a place where escaped mutants are going to start over, which may or may not even exist. Reticently, Logan realizes he has one more heroic journey in him, and that he has to protect this girl from the team of mercenaries chasing them (an iteration of the Reavers from the comic books) led by one particularly nasty SOB named Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook).


Holbrook is good here and Richard E. Grant chews some scenery well in later scenes, but the real villain of “Logan” is time. Professor X has gotten to a point late in his life where he has seizures, and if you’ve ever wondered what happens when a telekinetic so powerful that his brain has been classified as a weapon of mass destruction has seizures, wonder no more. He needs a sedative shot to stop a seizure and pills to keep them from coming on in the first place. He knows he doesn’t have much time left on this planet. And neither does Logan, who Jackman plays as a man more than a superhero in one of the best performances of his career. Jackman interprets Logan as a man who has lost most of his friends and most of his purpose, hesitant to fight again. Again, it's like the late-career roles of Wayne or Eastwood in that sense, an icon forced into action for a final time, but Jackman wisely plays the humanity of his iconic character instead of the mutant abilities. It's a fantastic performance.


One can look back on “Logan” and pull apart the themes and philosophies of the film, but it’s important to note that it’s a viscerally exciting film to experience. The comparisons to “Children of Men” and classic Westerns may lead one to believe that this is overwritten and overly intellectual. Nothing is further from the truth. This is a great action movie, first and foremost. The action scenes have purpose and connect so much more powerfully than most superhero films, in which they are often just ways to show off the budget. When “Logan” breaks out into action, it feels organic to the plot, moving the themes and characters forward, much like in James Cameron’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” another film which this one reflects in its road structure and that of a protector for the next generation (and in another way that I won’t spoil).


“Logan” is the rare blockbuster that could be a game-changer. It will certainly change the way we look at other superhero movies and how history judges the entire MCU and DC Universe of films. Don’t get me wrong. I love a good popcorn superhero movie as much as the next guy (maybe even more than most critics), but “Logan” shows how deep one can go in the genre if they just approach it in a different way. In that sense, "Logan" deconstructs the modern superhero movie. It will be hard to put it back together again.

[jo]

LOGAN is now CERTIFIED FRESH by Rotten Tomatoes, before it officially opens!

TOMATOMETER

95%
Average Rating: 8.1/10
Reviews Counted: 81
Fresh: 77
Rotten: 4

[jo]

Rotten Tomatoes
Verified account
‏@rottentomatoes 21m
21 minutes ago

#Logan has been #CertifiedFresh at 95% ---> bit.ly/2lgSSOt  #Tomatometer @wolverinemovie @realhughjackman

[jo]

I am not even sure if this review by THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN ( "Independent, student-run newspaper of the UC Berkeley campus and the Berkeley, CA community" ) will wind up with Rotten Tomatoes, but it is another look at the excellent storytelling and at the powerhouse cast's very fine performances!

www.dailycal.org/2017/02/27/389926/

Film & Television
Monday, February 27, 2017

‘Logan’ is perfectly brutal, profoundly emotional send off for Hugh Jackman

"Logan" | 20th Century Fox
Grade: A
By Harrison Tunggal | Staff
Last Updated 10 hours Ago



Seventeen years ago, Hugh Jackman bared Wolverine’s adamantium claws for the first time in the original “X-Men.” Nine movies, two Deadpools and countless black jumpsuits later, and Jackman is ready to hang up his iconic claws. We are fortunate, then, that “Logan” is one of the best superhero films of all time. Emotionally and aesthetically, Jackman’s last hurrah is a beautiful tale and a testament to what the superhero genre can be.

Set in 2029, the film finds Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) living under the radar on the Mexican border. Both characters feel the strains of age but muster their strength to protect a young mutant, Laura (Dafne Keen), in a world mostly bereft of them. The story burrows to the core of Logan’s conflict throughout the “X-Men” films: He’s a loner, but he doesn’t necessarily want to be. Logan desires a sense of family, and this film is all about that — the ones that are broken, the ones we long for and the ones we end up with.

The film’s family-driven narrative is undeniably moving — a credit to its powerhouse cast. Jackman pours profound grief and unbridled rage into a performance that is his strongest in the franchise. In this film though, Logan’s age puts him at his most physically vulnerable, which gives way to an emotional vulnerability as well. Other “X-Men” films only scratched the surface of Logan’s inner depth, and this film allows Jackman to shine in moments of quiet reflection and repose. Because of his performance, we feel the weight of a lifetime of pain and loss — a level of gravitas and complexity rarely seen in most comic book fare.

Jackman owns this film, but Dafne Keen is its breakout star. She plays Laura, or X-23, who would best be described as an angrier, scarier and slightly more verbal version of Eleven a la “Stranger Things.” Keen’s snarl game matches Jackman’s, but like him, she nails her quieter dramatic scenes too, and the rapport Laura establishes with Logan is truly beautiful to watch unfold. Keen certainly isn’t the only standout supporting actor though. Patrick Stewart offers us the crankier version of Professor Xavier we didn’t know we wanted, while still being the sentimental paternal figure from previous films.

Though Jackman, Keen and Stewart shine in front of the camera, director James Mangold’s vision is the film’s fourth star. “Logan” is unabashedly a Western, remarkable for being one of the few superhero films to transcend its own genre. The film’s locations are reminiscent of “Hell or High Water,” the car chases may as well feature horses instead of trucks and there are overt references to the 1953 Western classic, “Shane.” This certainly doesn’t mean that “Logan” embraces style over substance. Instead, the film’s Western drapings are a narrative vehicle: Logan is our old gunslinger, and it’s a purposeful characterization that enhances the story.
Aside from establishing an aesthetic unseen in the superhero genre, Mangold deserves praise for tastefully handling the film’s R-rating. The film embraces the rating — heads roll, and Logan and Laura fight in a berserker fury previously exclusive to the comics — but Mangold never lets the violence outweigh the narrative’s emotional stakes. “Logan” would rather be an intensely affecting character drama than a pointlessly gory spectacle.

Make no mistake though. This film, like Mangold’s “The Wolverine,” features moments of pure comic book fantasy. But such moments serve the film’s thematic elements and, thus, “Logan” embraces its comic book roots while eschewing the blue sky beams and obligatory sequel setup that plague other films of the genre.

The question on every moviegoer’s mind is how “Logan” compares to “The Dark Knight,” which is generally accepted as the greatest superhero film of all time. Only time will tell if “Logan” surpasses or matches it, but it is the only superhero film worthy of the comparison. Such matters, however, concern the future. For now, “Logan” deserves to be lauded as the perfect send off for Hugh Jackman. His departure from the role is the end of an era, one we have been fortunate to witness.


“Logan” opens this Thursday at UA Berkeley 7.

[jo]

Another review that focuses on strong character delineation -- a 5 of 5 stars artistic triumph!

graffitiwithpunctuation.com/reviews/this-will-be-the-last-time-logan-2017-review

“Logan” is a film that you’ve probably already heard about. In amongst the tsunami of hyperbole the message is clear, Hugh Jackman’s last hurrah as the Wolverine is arguably the best yet. “Logan” synthesises comic book characters into the real world in a way that’s only been reached in what Roger Ebert called the “engrossing tragedy” of the “The Dark Knight.” Despite being the ninth addition to the beloved Jackman Wolverine cinematic canon, feels like a quantum leap in the character. Writer/director James Mangold understands the elemental make-up of the Wolverine and Professor Xavier and uses mutations as dramatic enhancements for this profound tale of redemption. 

“Logan” isn’t a slave to any particular comic book story, despite sharing some aesthetic attributes to the comic book ‘Wolverine: Old Man Logan’ (written by Mark Millar) and thematic similarities to ‘Wolverine’ (by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller). “Logan” is a simple tale, one where once heroic figures have now faded into obscurity. In 2029 mutants have all but disappeared. It appears that genetic mutation has been eradicated and those that remain are in hiding. On the U.S/Mexico borderlands Logan (Jackman) and Caliban (Stephen Merchant) are caring for nonagenarian Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), whose grip on his supremely powerful mind is slipping away. A mysterious woman appears to enlist Logan as an escort for Laura (Dafne Keen), a young special girl on the run from robotically enhanced Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) his soldiers (’Reavers’). Compelled to see the girl to safety, Logan, Charles and Laura get on the road to escape the dogged pursuit of this shady organisation. 


The Wolverine character has been expanded and retooled every addition to the franchise, but “Logan” realises everything about the character that other films in the “X-Men” have only glanced past. Writers Mangold, Scott Frank and Michael Green understand intimacy, the elemental make-up of this perpetual outsider who despite his best efforts to isolate himself, cannot but intervene when he sadists willing to prey on the weak. The powerful ensemble is not threatened by world ending cataclysms (“X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Batman V Superman”), they’re on the run from a small and brutal outfit and battling the inevitable decay of their powers. The stakes are truly life and death; finally. 

Of course Jackman’s performance as Logan is stellar; he’s often been the highlight of the Fox mutant franchise. In every frame of the film he’s delivering a commitment to the performance and to character that he’s been waiting for the material to offer. This is a deeply damaged soldier duty bound to loyalty and mantles that he knows no-one else would be suited for. With Charles’ condition, although Caliban is assisting, there’s no-one who can stand next to this unstable atomic reactor of a mind. Jackman is raw, tough, wounded and there’s nothing he holds back in this final iconic performance.


The chemistry between the central trio of characters Logan, Charles (Stewart) and Laura (Keen) propels the film. Stewart and Jackman have been waiting to be able to unleash the fury in their roles, without censorship training wheels. When you hear Charles chastise Logan and drop a convoy of F-Bombs in frustration at Logan’s means of care you feel like the relieving laughs are cathartic for the entire series worth of performances. Stewart’s Charles in “Logan” is a shell of the titan he was and it’s distressing. Stewart relishes an opportunity to lose control of his weaponised mind. Mangold doesn’t allow Charles into our heads in “Logan” and forces Stewart into a performance that casts doubt on whether he’s able to harness any of his remaining power. 
Dafne Keen is the absolute stand-out of the film. Spending at least half of the movie without saying a word; she’s got a fury, a terrifying force in a diminutive package that makes her believably emotionally delicate and explosive.

There are some fantastic special effects but they’re crafted to intensify moments of conflict. It’s a film that finally adds emergency room gore and consequence to clashes between our heroes and those who would stand in their way. Wolverine’s lightning fast healing ability has now slowed to a crawl and his body is a mass of grizzled scar tissue. Watching him drag a stuck retractable claw to its full length and tearing up his hand in the process shows the extent of the degradation. The main use of digital effects is visualising Charles using its power as it’s slipping away. In a stop along their journey, Logan is finding a replacement to their bullet hole riddled limousine. As he arrives back at the Casino hotel, he sees Pierce’s ‘Reavers’ have descended and just as he’s calculating what kind of violence that he’s going to have to dish out to cut his way to Laura and Xavier the very air begins to shift and shake. If you’ve seen Bryan Singer’s original X-Men, you’ve witnessed the peak of the Professor’s power. In a flash when Bobby a.k.a Iceman and Pyro get into an altercation that reveals their powers in a crowded museum food court the entire population is suddenly frozen. Now in his 90s, his grip and control on his mind is slipping.  When Charles uses his power time slows, the air quakes and most are stuck in a disorientating pulsing seizure. Logan, less impacted due to his power, wades through the vibration, killing frozen foes all the way until he can administer medication. Mangold and Stewart craft a relatable blight that is usually reserved for what we see in characters suffering from dementia.


Holbrook is wonderful, you kind of have the feeling that he’s only going to be able to play second fiddle to Richard E. Grant’s Dr. Rice,  but instead he’s a tough and cruel entity played straight edged and sadistic. He’s the literal enhanced right hand of another in a string of exploitative evil scientific geniuses. Holbrook’s apathy and adherence to the orders of his evil superiors doesn’t absolve him from any responsibility, instead he’s the face of all they come to represent. Holbrook has a charm and radiates the thrill of being on the scent of prey; hunting Logan is the biggest trophy that he’s ever had to wrangle. 

Merchant’s Caliban plays Jack Lemon to Jackman’s Walter Matthau in this mutant odd couple of their Mexican sanctuary. They have a great rapport that enlivens the gallows humour of this team standing on that figurative ice-flow waiting for it float gracefully out to sea. Merchant dwarfs and nags at Jackman’s Logan and emphasises just how serious we should be about Charles’s condition. It’s a welcome and great little dramatic performance, and if not for his height and distinctive voice, he’s barely recognisable. 


The comic book movie genre has leapt forward in quality in the last 17 years. “Logan” reaches the pinnacle of the genre that “The Dark Knight” stands atop. Logan’s healing factor has diminished. The traumas of battles physically and psychologically torment the character. “Logan” has been referred to as a Western throughout the effusive criticism already written. While the other entries into the series have toyed with the concept of this vigilante, living on the frontier of existence, being compelled to fight for Xavier’s cause; it has remained in the subtext. In “Logan” though, Mangold creates a setting and a structure for the Western anti-hero text and subtext to collide. 

Mangold and Jackman paired up for two Wolverine tales. They represent the morality, empathy and archetypal echoes of those begrudging rogue cowboys compelled to do good; whatever town they come upon. Comic book movies have desensitised us to consequence. Death is too often a passing fad, easily corrected. “Logan” defies those limitations. 
★★★★★

[jo]

The review from ROLLING STONE ( not yet including in the Rotten Tomatoes summary) -- I am choosing which review to print not on the basis of heavily favoring the movie ( they practically all do, save for a few recalcitrant ones ) -- I like to print those which are almost poetic in their praise of the film!


www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/peter-travers-logan-movie-review-w469327

'Logan' Review: Hugh Jackman's 'X-Men' Swan Song Is Bloody, Violent, Brilliant
Actor's final turn as popular mutant superhero – now in his autumn years – is the perfect blaze-of-glory goodbye

'Logan' is the Wolverine movie you've been waiting for – Peter Travers on why Hugh Jackman's X-Men swan song is one of the best superhero movies ever.


By Peter Travers
2 hours ago


Is Wolverine getting old? Think of this renegade, genre-defying chapter in the film franchise as X-Men: The AARP Years. Don't panic: Logan is a hard-ass, R-rated rager that explodes with action. But what makes it indelibly raw and touching is the sight of mutant heroes raging against the dying of the light. The year is 2029, and the X-Men have gone the way of the T-Rex. No mutant births have been recorded for 25 years. The artist formerly known as Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is now a boozer who limps, wears glasses and scrapes out a living by chauffeuring bachelorette parties.


It's ironic that Jackman, having a 10th and final go at the career-defining role that made him a star, has never been better or more emotionally alive. Logan's claws are slow on the draw and his self-healing powers are on the fritz, but he's committed to caring for his mentor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart, so good you want to applaud). It's not easy watching Professor X suffer seizures that rattle his telepathic brain and shake up anyone in the vicinity. Helping Logan keep Charles on his meds and the world from imploding is Caliban (Stephen Merchant), a light-sensitive, albino mutant with the power to track approaching enemies. All three live in seclusion in a vacant smelting plant in El Paso, Texas, that looks like the land time forgot. Pretty bleak. Then they get discovered. And director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, The Wolverine), in peak form and working deep and true, unleashes the dogs of war.



Logan has the shape of a classic western. Shane is directly referenced in one scene and the elegiac tone of the film recalls Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning Unforgiven. And like those old horse operas, Mangold is investigates the nature of heroism by giving the grizzled Wolverine someone new to protect. She's a mute, 11-year-old girl named Laura and, as played by smashing newcomer Dafne Keen, she's close enough to Wolverine in powers to be a chip off the old block of adamantium. It's Laura who convinces Logan and Charles to hit the road to North Dakota, the location of what she believes is an Eden for young mutants. (The kid read about it in an X-Men comic book, which Logan hilariously treats as fake news.) In hot pursuit are Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant), a bioengineer whose dirty work  is done by the cybernetic Reavers, led by Donald Pierce (Narcos' Boyd Holbrook). This henchman is one twisted terror, hiding his malice behind a Texas twang and a serious fanboy crush on Wolverine. He also may be the first movie villain of the new millennium named Donald. We're sensing a trend.


As to what happens next ... let's just say that you should expect the most violent showdowns yet in the series, as well as scenes of wrenching emotion. Loosely based on Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's comic-book Old Man Logan, the script that Mangold wrote with Scott Frank and Michael Green tempers its brutality with a testament to family and a need to belong that crosses borders and bloodlines. Make no mistake, Logan earns its tears. If Jackman and Stewart are serious about this being their mutual X-Men swan song, they could not have crafted a more heartfelt valedictory.

[jo]

Wow -- what a review piece!!

www.vulture.com/2017/03/movie-review-logan-is-so-so-so-dark.html

March 2, 2017 3:04 p.m.
The Dark, Dystopian Logan Is Epic in Its Brutality

By David Edelstein



My reaction while watching the new Fox superhero movie Logan was a series of variations on the word “fuck,” as in, “Holy fuck!” “Fuck me!” and “Fuuuuuuuuck!!!” uttered at regular intervals, not in anger but astonishment. The film is stunningly bleak and staggeringly violent. Major characters go down in showers of blood and gore. I’ve seen worse and so, probably, have you, but never from such an essentially wholesome corporate enterprise with a target audience so young and hopeful. (Onscreen product placements include Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.) Logan is rated R, but tell me that 10-year-olds won’t find ways to see it before the weekend is out. Child therapists are going to have a banner March.

I’m not complaining, exactly. It would be hypocritical to tut-tut over the carnage in print when at various junctures I screamed my approval as Hugh Jackman’s Logan — a.k.a. the Wolverine — shredded the gullets of sundry assassins with his adamantium talons. But it’s hard to reconcile the movie’s scorched-earth nihilism with its X-Men and Wolverine predecessors. Those giddy tales of so-called mutants coming to terms with their metamorphosing bodies and fragile place in the social ecosystem seem so far away now, like bedtime fairy tales. I picture Christopher Nolan saying of Logan, “Um, it’s kind of dark, isn’t it?”

The movie opens in darkness. Logan is passed out in the limo he drives by day, drunk and apathetic to anything but earning money to buy a boat and sail away with Patrick Stewart’s X-Men headmaster Charles Xavier, who seems to be melting down in his old age into a psychic lethal weapon. Logan is ill, too, poisoned by adamantium, the super-metal that allows him to decapitate and disembowel anyone who tries to take him out. Logan, Charles, and their X-Men brethren are like fallen rock stars, victims of having flown too high for too long. In that opening scene, some thugs are trying to steal the wheels off Logan’s limo and he barely has the energy to dismember them.
On the basis of Logan, I’d guess that the director James Mangold (The Wolverine, 3:10 to Yuma) and his co-screenwriters, Scott Frank and Michael Green, aren’t too happy about the direction in which the U.S. is going. (And Trump wasn’t even president when they wrote it!) In dribs and drabs they fill in parts of the picture, but not everything.

It seems — please skip this paragraph if you’d rather not be oriented — something bad happened to other X-Men characters. Mutant-kind has all but vanished. The military has joined forces with Big Pharma to do hideous experiments on Mexican women, while kids who escape the Nazi-like labs have to flee to sanctuary in — wait for it — Canada. Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses can only breathe free in the land of moose. Two people, meanwhile, are dogging Logan: A Mexican woman pleading for help for a mysterious, mute little girl named Laura (Dafne Keen); and a semi-mutant — I don’t know exactly what he is — called Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), who’s hunting Laura and anyone trying to protect her. Pierce has what seems like hundreds of brawny men at his command, plus a superhuman surprise or two.


Logan is basically a long (nearly two and a half hours) and furious chase movie, like Terminator 2 with a dollop of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — the one where the allegedly hard-hearted Max ends up leading a bunch of wild children to safety. There are also direct invocations of the classic cornball Western Shane, which little Laura watches on TV while she, Logan, and Charles spend the night with a black family whose farm is being threatened by a colossal, corn-syrup-producing agribusiness. Logan, of course, gets his own rousing Shane showdown: He accompanies the farmer, Munson (Eriq La Salle), to the neighboring property, where menacing corporate henchmen regularly shut off the water pump to his house and land. It’s the only scene that delivers a traditionally upbeat Western kick, but it’s largely there to lull you into a false sense of security. Honestly, folks, no matter how many murderous thugs get turned into hamburger, there’s no balm in Gilead — or Logan.

Hard to believe it has been 17 years since the first X-Men movie with Jackman as Logan, and in middle age he’s still muscled-up and ropy — maybe even ropier, given how alarmingly the veins stand out in his arms and chest. You can believe there’s something corrosive in those veins, like battery acid. He’s being eaten alive before your eyes, and in what could be Logan’s last stand, Jackman brings everything he has, from animal rage to mute despair. He gazes on Stewart’s rasping, declaiming, and howling Charles Xavier like Kent in King Lear, which made me think that this is Stewart’s dry run for his inevitable go-round with the shattered monarch. (I’ve seen, like, ten Lears in the last decade, but I’m all in for P-Stew’s.) The showstopping performance, though, is by Stephen Merchant. He plays a sun-averse albino mutant called Caliban, but despite the Shakespearean name, he’s like a tottering little scold out of Beckett’s Endgame. That’s fitting, since this is the X-Men endgame. That’s not to say there won’t be prequels, “reboots,” and many parallel-time scenarios. There just won’t necessarily be these particular mortals in the roles they created.

On its own terms, Logan is a crackerjack piece of work: The dialogue is crisp, the staging snappy, and the action scenes really pop. One of those scenes is screamingly perverse — a bit in which Logan turns a Las Vegas suite into a charnel house when a group of killers is frozen in place by the apocalyptic emanations from Charles Xavier’s synapses. But when my 14-year-old daughter — who I won’t let see the movie right now — said, “But Dad, did you like it?” I couldn’t give her a simple yes or no. I can’t remember the last time a blockbuster has left me so ravaged — and I’m including Rogue One, which at least ended with the word, “Hope.” My freak-out isn’t just about what happens to the characters. It’s the country in which they live and die that ushers in the nightmares. If this is the superhero movie that most accurately evokes how we live now, we’re in even more trouble than I thought.

[jo]

Great review by Manohla Dargis of THE NEW YORK TIMES --

www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/movies/logan-review-hugh-jackman-wolverine-x-men.html?_r=0

Review: In ‘Logan,’ a Comic-Book Stalwart Turns Noirish Western

Logan Directed by James Mangold Action, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller R 2h 17m

By MANOHLA DARGISMARCH 2, 2017



“Logan” is good enough that you might forget it’s a comic-book movie. It’s another entry in the tireless X-Men saga but doesn’t play like a retread or an ad for the next installment; instead, it plays, looks and sounds like a movie — an old-school meets new-school pulp filled with intimations of mortality, and raw, ugly violence. Once again, Hugh Jackman has saddled up to play the Wolverine, a mutant who also goes by Logan, and has always been the most satisfying character in the series. Mr. Jackman’s charm can lighten the glummest dirge, but for comic-book agnostics the real appeal is Logan’s reluctance to get involved, an ambivalence that can feel familiar to viewers exhausted by the same fight.

This is the 10th time that Mr. Jackman has played Logan, and while the character’s claws are intact, the movie is a major narrative and stylistic shift in its franchise universe. It was directed by James Mangold, who shares script credit with Scott Frank and Michael Green, and has the clarity and directness of a classic genre picture. It’s part western, part neo-noir, the kind of movie in which a stranger steps from the shadows and shakes off his isolation and existential burden long enough to right whatever wrong needs righting. You know him: He’s the man with the tight smile and split lip, the one whose hard talk never fully obscures his wounded soul.


The opener is kinetic, efficiently staged, casually sadistic and near-ritualistic in how it conforms to the genre playbook. Logan is napping in his parked car not far from the United States-Mexico border when he is awakened by a gang trying to steal his tires. It’s an archetypal poke-the-bear scene, the sort in which the hero announces his bona fides by eradicating villains too stupid to know what they are up against. Logan calls out to them, as if giving them fair warning. It’s pointless. Like most generic bad guys, these exist purely to wind the hero up — they’re the action-movie equivalent of foreplay — and soon Logan is slicing and dicing, spearing bodies like kebabs.

Scenes like these turn characters into garbage that the hero has to bag up and toss. That’s standard genre posturing, but Logan is as much a hero as an outlier and can’t descend into nihilism. He needs a cause, a banner to hoist. So the movie complicates its bloodletting, including through a story line about corporate violence run amok in a near-lawless future. Enter the rogue geneticist (played with restrained flair by Richard E. Grant) with a venal aide-de-camp (a charismatic Boyd Holbrook) and an army of paramilitary cyborgs. These, in turn, connect to Laura (a terrific newcomer, Dafne Keen), a watchful, feral child who is fleeing across borders.


Before long, Logan is playing the resistant head of a household that includes Laura as the ultimate in uncontrollable spawn and a sickly Professor X (Patrick Stewart) as their noble paterfamilias. Mr. Stewart, using a rasp that suggests decay is working its way out from the inside, does some beautiful work, especially with Mr. Jackman. Pushing and pulling at each other, they create a shared vulnerability that’s expressed both in physical degradations — the movie is filled with ravaged, traumatized bodies — and in the contrapuntal play between Logan’s gruff tenderness and Professor X’s floundering. (He’s Gramps by way of King Lear.)


Much of “Logan” is an extended chase sequence, with Logan et al. forced on the run while pursued by the corporate concern. There are detours and kind strangers, open skies and endless miles, carnage and politics. En route, Mr. Mangold occasionally resorts to cliché, but many of his choices feel fresh, paradoxically because he has the heart of a classicist. He has watched his share of Clint Eastwood and old Hollywood, too. He’s also a sentimentalist, as his nod to the 1953 western “Shane” suggests. (“A gun is a tool,” that film’s gunslinger says, “as good or as bad as the man using it.”) The romance of the righteous kill remains a cinematic article of faith.

“Logan” is a strong argument for bringing the comic-book movie down to earth. It solidly hits its marks as it moves the franchise furniture around, and features striking special-effects scenes in which the world shudders to a near standstill. Here, though, the pyrotechnics serve the story and are of a piece with a scaled-down realism that acknowledges — in its scars, viscera and flood of parentless children — the cost of the endless fight. It loves that fight, of course: That’s entertainment. But as it intimately tethers you to Logan and Laura, at times uncomfortably (their claws were made for impaling), it reminds you that these mutants are never less than human.

I did get similar vibes -- film noir and tragic Shakespeare!

[jo]

The review from the ASSOCIATED PRESS (AP) -- hopefully, the review that will be reprised by many media outlets in the USA and elsewhere --


bigstory.ap.org/article/bb85b895615948f5aa9de5d0bf39b5ea/review-logan-satisfying-end-jackmans-wolverine

Review: 'Logan' a satisfying end for Jackman's Wolverine
By SANDY COHEN
Mar. 2, 2017 3:36 PM EST



"Logan " is not for the faint of heart — not just because of its brutal violence, but because it packs an emotional wallop you don't typically expect from a comic-book movie.

Featuring Hugh Jackman's final turn as Wolverine, "Logan" isn't a shiny, colorful, superhero-style film, either. It's gritty, dark, and a deeply satisfying conclusion for fans who've followed the clawed character through Jackman's past eight movie outings with the X-Men and alone as Wolverine.

Writer-director James Mangold, who also directed 2013's "The Wolverine," clearly loves the character as much as Jackman does, and both seem liberated by this film's R rating. "Logan" is not a kids' movie. It's viscerally violent — lots of claws-through-the-face shots — and emotionally profound as it explores the relationship between Logan and Professor X (Patrick Stewart).

Viewers would need some basic familiarity with these characters to fully appreciate the story told in "Logan." If you don't know anything about the relationship between the title mutant and Charles Xavier (Stewart), the arc they experience in this film would be far less impactful.

(The quick version: Professor X is the de-facto leader of mutants, who most appreciates them and their powers. Logan has resented the immortality that comes with his mutant-ness, and has a lot softer heart than his claws would indicate.)

It's the near future, and Logan is a hard-drinking limo-driver for hire. As one of the few remaining mutants, he keeps a low profile while caring for an aging and ill Professor X, who's hidden in a secret silo just south of the Mexican border. Half the time he babbles nonsense, but the professor tells him there's a young mutant coming their way, and soon they're charged with Laura, a little girl who doesn't speak but has deadly claws like Wolverine.

A slick-looking villain with a "Terminator" hand (a perfectly smarmy Boyd Holbrook) is interested in this young mutant as well. She was part of a pseudo-military genetic research project led by the evil Dr. Rice (Richard E. Grant, even smarmier).

Laura (entrancing newcomer Dafne Keen) is planning to meet the other kids Dr. Rice experimented on in Eden, a place they read about in an X-Men comic book. So meta.

Thus the story becomes a road movie, with Logan, Laura and Xavier comprising an endearing and offbeat family on their way to Eden as they try to outrun Dr. Rice and his goons. Logan is reluctant and disinterested, Xavier is kind and a little kooky, and Laura is mute.

Laura is also a killer badass, and Keen makes her so fun to watch. Imagine Wolverine's powers in a pint-sized, ponytailed package. Between the 11-year-old's performance and flawless special effects, Keen's fight scenes are as thrilling and bloodletting as any of Wolverine's.

And Jackman doubly delivers as Wolverine. You'll see what I mean when you watch the film. He is in top form as both an action star and an actor, bringing heart to his dramatic scenes and wielding unmatched adamantium power in the action sequences.

Beyond the claws, there's also some cutting-edge car play, including a throw-down between a limo, two motorcycles and a barbed-wire fence. Mangold also manages to work in an anti-GMO message about a Monsanto-like company and pay tribute to classic cinema with a nod to the 1953 Western, "Shane."

"Logan" is a family drama, an action thriller and an epic superhero story. If this is indeed Jackman's last Wolverine film, he's going out in heartfelt, high-class style.

"Logan," a 20th Century Fox release, is rated R for "strong brutal violence and language throughout, and for brief nudity." Running time: 141 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

[jo]

Another often-quoted film critic, Richard Roeper, writes a favorable review of LOGAN --

chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/in-logan-reinvented-wolverine-makes-a-deep-impression/

Entertainment 03/01/2017, 09:26am

In ‘Logan,’ reinvented Wolverine makes a deep impression


Richard Roeper
@richardroeper | email


Just when I thought I had Logan fatigue to the point of not caring if I ever saw the muttonchopped clawmeister ever again, along comes the best “Wolverine” movie of all.

James Mangold’s darkly entertaining and surprisingly layered “Logan” is a brutal, bittersweet and bloody sendoff to one of the most enduring characters in the “X-Men” universe. The smart and bold script affords Hugh Jackman the opportunity to reinvent his portrayal of Logan/Wolverine, and the result is one of the best performances of Jackman’s career — and one of the most impressive superhero movies of this decade.

Set in a bleak near future in which the X-Men have all but disappeared from the planet and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters is no more, “Logan” is as much a Western as it is a sci-fi thriller. Let me count just some of the ways:


• Our heroes are ragtag “outlaws” on the run from a relentless posse.
• Horses. We get horses in this movie. At one point, the horses get loose! We have to save the horses!
• A decent and God-fearing family is fighting an uphill battle against a ruthless and greedy band of local criminals who are trying to ruin them and drive them off their homestead.
• For much of the film, Jackman’s Logan sports a full beard and a somewhat dated hairstyle that makes him look like Clint Eastwood circa “Pale Rider” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” (Even though Eastwood’s Westerns are of course set in the 19th century, the actor usually sported hairstyles in keeping with whatever year in which the movie was filmed.)
• There are multiple visual and dialogue-driven references to the classic Western “Shane.”

Most important, “Logan” just has the tone and the pacing and the feel of a Western — a very violent Western in which guts are spilled and heads are severed and characters both evil and good are sent to their Maker after being blown apart by shots to the torso and to the head at medium-close range.


The opening scene, in which a drunken, battered Logan rises up against some carjackers who picked the wrong victim, leaves no doubt as to the brutal nature of “Logan.” Whereas in most previous “Wolverine” movies, the violence was largely bloodless and of the CGI variety, this time there’s a visceral punch to our senses every time Logan’s claws come out and start piercing and slicing and dicing.

It’s the year 2029. Logan is scraping out a living as an Uber-type limo driver. He’s almost always drunk or hung over or a combination of both.

Patrick Stewart’s Charles/Professor X is living out what appear to be his final days near the Mexican border, in a rusty, toppled-over water tank that has been turned into a makeshift lab. An albino mutant named Caliban (Stephen Merchant), suffering from his own demons, helps Logan look after the ailing Charles, who can remember things only in flashes, suffers from seizures that literally shake the ground — and has to be strapped down for his own good. Logan’s visits to Charles are all about injecting him with drugs to ease his suffering and put him to sleep. They’re living out the final chapter of the sad and tragic demise of the X-Men.

Enter a frantic, desperate woman named Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez from “Orange Is the New Black”), who tracks down Logan and pleads with him to transport a young girl named Laura (Dafne Keen) to North Dakota.

Turns out Laura, who doesn’t speak, is something of a mini-Wolverine. She’s got the metal claws and the superhuman speed and some nifty fighting moves, and she’s not afraid to lash out when she or someone she loves is threatened.

Gabriela claims Laura is the result of a secret medical experiment to breed an army of super-mutants. There are other children like her, on the run, making their way to a supposed safe camp in North Dakota.
Logan isn’t buying the story and he doesn’t care to get involved, but circumstances leave him on the road with Charles and the little girl, trying to make their way up north while staying one step ahead of the ruthless, sadistic Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and his posse of killer henchmen.

Director Mangold places much of “Logan” in wide-open, sparsely populated locales, where the big cities and big problems of the world are referenced but not visited. We’re on the road, in the woods, at a home in the country, at lonely gas stations and convenience stores. Even when Logan reluctantly commits to protecting Laura and honoring Charles’ wishes, it’s clear he’s been battered and bruised inside and out so many times, all he really wants to do is drink and forget and drink so more and try to numb anything resembling human feelings.

For all its moodiness and melancholy, “Logan” is also a rip-roaring action film — and it’s wickedly funny at times as well.

Stewart, who has been playing his character on and off for nearly two decades, gives his usual Shakespearean, magnificent performance. Young Dafne Keen is fierce and endearing.

And Hugh Jackman sharpens his claws in every sense of the word and delivers killer work.

★★★1⁄2

 

[jo]

On METACRITIC, the more rigid summary of very selective critic reviews, 49 selected critics scored an average of 77%.

Here's the link to all the critic reviews selected, with their numerical ratings.

www.metacritic.com/movie/logan-2017/critic-reviews

[jo]

Nice tribute to Hugh ... it is all about Hugh!

Review
Logan: Jackman nails Wolverine’s complexity in his serious, stripped-down X-finale

Barry Hertz

The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Mar. 01, 2017 10:17AM EST
Last updated Thursday, Mar. 02, 2017 11:44AM EST


Directed by James Mangold
Written by James Mangold, Scott Frank and Michael Green
Starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Dafne Keen
Classification 18A
Genre drama
Year 2017
Country USA
Language English



With nine films under his belt as the mutton-chopped, cigar-chomping, adamantium-clawed Canadian mutant Wolverine, Hugh Jackman might seem like an easy candidate for the Guinness Book of Records. But in fact, there are a surprising number of comers in the singular competition for who has played the same film character the most amount of times, with Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton tied for the honour, thanks to their Blondie pics of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s (28 films in total).

Yet perhaps the record books should make a Hugh Jackman exception. The Australian actor may not have inhabited Wolverine’s skin for as long as, say, Desmond Llewelyn played Bond gadget guru Q (35 years!) but he has survived the great Hollywood comic-book explosion of the past two decades, in which an inexhaustible hunger for fresh, rebooted content ensures no one actor gets to strap on the tights for all that long. Since Jackman first bared his claws in 2000’s X-Men, the dawn of the spandex-cinema era, there have been three Spider-Mans, three Hulks, three Punishers, two Batmans, two Supermans and two too many Daredevils (sorry, but that character’s a bore).

There has only ever been one Wolverine, and as the new, ostensibly final outing Logan proves, there should only be one Wolverine.

Whereas most actors half-committing themselves to a superhero film look like they’d rather be anywhere else (namely, the bank), Jackman has always been completely immersed in the spectacle of it all. His Wolverine (a.k.a. Logan, a.k.a. Weapon X, a.k.a. Alberta-born James Howlett) is an irresistibly compelling figure, and Jackman twists the pain at the centre of the hero’s struggle into remarkably uncomfortable places for a blockbuster. A not-so-veiled truth about the X-Man is that his superpower is essentially tearing his own body apart so that he might do the same to others. In the eight films in which he’s had to carry that agony so far, Jackman has redefined how heroes work and how they break down.

Which makes Logan all the more satisfying. Designed to act as a tribute to both Wolverine and Jackman, the film drops any of the X-franchise’s more whiz-bang window dressing and CGI ridiculousness – this is a stripped-down, deadly serious drama about one man’s struggle to make peace with the immeasurable pain he’s caused, while at the same time recognizing that he must inflict just that much more damage to make things right. And Jackman nails it.

The film opens in 2029, with Wolverine inhabiting a depressing, if not quite apocalyptic, future (don’t even try to reconcile how the timeline works compared with any of the previous X-films; continuity has never been this series’ strong point). In Logan’s world, corporations set the world agenda even more than before, no mutant has been born in two decades and border issues rile the United States. It’s essentially Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men crossed with a Trumpian fever dream – Children of X-Men, if you will. And this is where our hero finds himself eking out a living as a chauffeur, driving a vaguely next-generation limousine while drinking himself to death, his body finally failing him after more than a hundred years.
But then along comes a surprise in the form of a little Mexican girl named Laura (newcomer Dafne Keen), who a near-senile Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) insists is the dawn of a new mutant age (yeah, this film leans heavily on Cuaron). So Wolverine gets to go on one last hero’s journey and Jackman gets to remind audiences just how skilled he is at balancing agony with charm, anger with ease. His Wolverine is at once familiar here and fresh, the distance between his 2000 debut and today adding an impressive, complex weight to a character who has grown alongside an entire generation of moviegoers.

By the time the narrative reaches its climax – bad guys in pursuit, salvation just in sight, blood on the floor – it’s almost painful to say goodbye, which is precisely the point. As the film’s first trailer promised with its score of Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt, Logan is all about suffering, despair, the damage done – and not in some abstract way, but in the visceral sense. Which is where the movie hits its sole, though major, false note.

In a break with genre tradition, Logan was produced with a hard-R rating in mind (perhaps studio Twentieth Century Fox thought there was more filthy Deadpool lucre to be mined). Blood is spilled in buckets, and there are more severed arms, legs, torsos and heads than any reasonable gore-hound could keep count of. The idea behind the violence is intriguing – let’s really show what happens to those who dare cross an X-Man – but director James Mangold exploits it too frequently, and with too much glee.

The effect is similar to a four-year-old boy discovering he can swear – cute at first, but distracting and even aggravating as time wears on. The very first line uttered in Logan is an F-bomb, and the vulgarity and excessive brutality only snowballs from there. There’s even a bit of female nudity slipped into the proceedings, for no real reason other than, “Why not?” It all calls to mind a crude XXX-Men joke, but to deliver it might make the producers all the more needlessly tumescent.

Still, Mangold mostly lets Logan stand as a showcase for Jackman, that rare performer who can take an already-iconic figure and own him completely, to the point where it’s hard to divorce the two. It will not be a shock when Fox inevitably recasts Wolverine, but it will be a crushing disappointment. Logan ends on a note of finality, but Jackman’s performance is eternal.

[jo]

It's best to read this after you have seen LOGAN.

This is not so much a review as a deep reflection and a very personal insight on what the human message of LOGAN is all about -- from the Editor-in-chief of rogerebert.com... It is a very good read -- the entire article. though quite long, is well-worth everyone's time, even for non-superhero movie fans!

Hope Hugh Jackman and James Mangold get to read it!


www.rogerebert.com/mzs/all-things-must-pass-the-emotional-reality-of-logan

The emotional reality of "Logan"
by Matt Zoller Seitz
March 5, 2017   |  




My grandfather lived eighteen months after my grandmother died of bone cancer. He spent the last 18 months of his life wasting away in the Retirement Inn in Dallas, Texas. My mother used to drop me off there to spend the day with him every Saturday and sometimes on Sunday. I was a sophomore in high school. I don't know if my mother really understood how bad things were getting or how much care he required. I used to help him take a shower. First I'd help him take his clothes off, then I'd walk him to the shower, then I'd stand there while he stood under the water, and then finally I'd help him towel off. He needed help with all this because he'd had a stroke and couldn't really lift his arms above his shoulders. I helped him to to the bathroom, too. Sometimes if he was really tired or was having issues with his arms, I'd wipe him.
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I don't remember when, exactly, that the dementia hit him. But it got steadily worse during his last six months. Sometimes he couldn't remember my name. Other times he'd call me Jake, which was the name of one of his brothers. And there were a few times when I knew that he had totally forgotten who I was, and was pretending  he remembered because he didn't want to be rude. Grandpa was a gentleman that way.
He became more sour and maudlin near the end. He used to rant about how his wife would still be alive if the doctors hadn't given her "the wrong medicine." It's possible that he was talking about the chemotherapy that my grandmother endured to stave off the effects of bone cancer, but I was sixteen, so I wasn't able to think metaphorically yet. I just thought he was lying to himself about how his wife died. I let him say whatever he wanted to say, no matter how ridiculous it sounded to me, until one day I snapped. "I wasn't the wrong medicine, you idiot, it was bone cancer," I yelled at him. "Bone cancer killed her. It ate her bones away the way termites eat wood. You saw her wasting away. You got the reports from the doctor. Shut up about the wrong medicine! Just shut up!"

He cursed me out. I'd never heard profanity like that pour out of the old man before. "Damn" or "hell" were usually about as far as he'd go. He was furious. Red in the face. He even tried to get up out of his chair so he could hit me, but he didn't have the strength, so he flopped back down in it and started to cry.
I felt nauseous and ashamed. How could I talk to him that way? I went over to him and hugged him.
"I'm sorry," he said. "You know I love you, buddy boy."
That was what he called me, Buddy boy.

Buddy for short.




I'd stowed these memories away for years. They all came rushing back watching Logan (Hugh Jackman) take care of Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who's ninety-something years old, confined to a wheelchair, and suffering seizures that have to be treated regularly with medication, otherwise he'll psychically lash out and cause great damage to the world.

Sometimes Xavier forgets to take his medicine. There are times when he doesn't recognize Logan. There are times when he gets short- tempered with Logan and has to apologize. On the other side, there are times when Logan loses his cool and snaps at Xavier. He feels a responsibility towards him, strong enough that it puts the lie to Logan's self-image as a damaged, worthless man who only brings harm to others.
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Logan understood teenage me, visiting my grandfather in the retirement home.
It also understood fortysomething me, trying to be a single father and not completely screw things up.
And there were moments when I saw aspects of myself in Laura (Dafne Keen), the girl that Logan protects. Laura is a gifted child who has rage issues. I had a touch of that. And I shared her sense of being completely alone in life, left to my own devices, to sink or swim, from an early age.

These are not the kinds of associations that big budget superhero films summon on the regular. Once in a while, for a scene or two. Or in stray moments. 

But for the most part, the Marvel and DC model isn't into that kind of thing. It's too risky.
Most contemporary superhero movies aren't movies, but movie-flavored products. They tend to be just good enough that you come out of the theater telling your friends "It was actually pretty good," but not so good that you walk around obsessing over them. And then a couple of years later the movie blurs into the endless slipstream of franchise continuity, trailers and stingers, wisecracks and fights. The entire mentality of these movie-flavored products is superficial, deliberately so. The skating-the-surface approach is part of the design, the marketing, the architecture. And people like it. They keep paying for it. That means it's working. And there's no compelling reason to mess with something that's working.

Christopher Nolan's "Batman" trilogy doesn't have any current equivalent in post-Marvel Comics Universe superhero cinema. I had problems with them when they first came out—no point getting into all that now, though, because with each passing year the Nolan Batmans look more like actual popular art compared to the next wave of superhero movies. Nolan's Batman movies are too peculiar and personal, too clearly the work of a possibly demented control freak who needs things to be done in a certain way, to exist in the current economic climate. Modern Marvel and DC films aren't really movies in the sense of "cinema" or "art," they're $200 million widgets that are either intended to fit together with other widgets to form a master narrative or sit adjacent to the master narrative (a la  "Ant-Man," the superhero movie equivalent of a sorbet) without jamming the gears and grinding the money-printing machine to a halt.

When the newer superhero films go for sincerity, they often achieve "sincerity" instead. On purpose. And they don't stay in that mode for long regardless, because the audience has been conditioned by Marvel and DC not to want real movies, works that dig deep and put you off-balance, unsure what to think or whether to resist a feeling or lean into it. They've been conditioned to want two-plus hours of sound and light with some jokes and a bit of fan service. The most purportedly "adult" of the films, the "R"-rated smash "Deadpool," was only adult in the sense that little kids weren't allowed to see it on their own because of the "R" rating. The hero is a teenager's idea of an adult man living with a death sentence, just as the title characters in "Batman vs. Superman" are a teenager's idea of emotionally damaged outsiders acting out their rage on each other and the world.



Logan in "Logan" is the real deal. His eyes have that wet, grey look that you see in people dealing with late-stage terminal cancer. He lives in a world where you take care of father figures who sometimes forget to take their medicine and occasionally curse you out in frustration or fail to recognize you. One of the funniest and most affecting scenes is where Logan helps Xavier use the bathroom, and we see Xavier's bony ankles peeking beneath the stall while he talks to Logan, who's standing outside facing away so he won't have to watch the old man do his business.

I had no idea that a Marvel movie could affect me the way "Logan" did.

I almost hesitate to type that because I don't want anybody to get the idea that this is a perfect movie, or a masterpiece of any kind. I don't want to oversell it.

James Mangold (who directed Jackman in his last, pretty good solo Wolverine outing, which was simply titled "The Wolverine") has made no secret of the fact that he drew  inspiration from classic westerns, including "Shane," which is quoted directly and perhaps too liberally at the end, and "Unforgiven" and "The Shootist" and other movies about aging or ill gunfighters drawn into one last crusade before they breathe their last. And there are moments, particularly near the end, when the film channels "The Outlaw Josey Wales," a story about a war veteran who keeps telling everyone he prefers to go it alone, yet keeps accumulating responsibilities as he goes along, and spends the final act of the movie in a commune in the wilderness not unlike the one where those mutant kids hole up.

"Logan" isn't on the level of any of those movies. The action, while shocking, scary and sometimes stirring, grows repetitious after a while, and even though this is already a long picture (two hours, 17 minutes) there were times when I wouldn't have minded more development of key set-pieces, such as the stretch near the end at the mountaintop refuge, where it momentarily seems as if Logan is about to assume the same exalted place that Xavier once occupied at his "special needs" school.

But right now I don't really feel like listing the ways in which "Logan" could have been better, because it has integrity and a big heart and it moved me.

This is a film where people try to drive through chain-link fences and their cars get snarled up. It's a film where old men forget to take their medicine and superheroes angrily crank the ignition on trucks that don't start. It's a superhero film that has things to say, smart things, about the impact of mechanization on everyday lives, and the way that late capitalist society encourages people to use junk food and medicine to regulate their moods and manage the pain of living.

There's even a sub-theme—a touch too meta but still fascinating—about the difference between this kind of film and the typical Marvel film. Where the former is about life as it actually is, daily frustrations and humiliations and all, the latter is escapist or aspirational. It's about how we wish life could be, and it often serves up tantalizing wish fulfillment fantasies, cool images of cool people doing cool things and living in Gothic mansions and cliff-side bachelor pads, tearing around the city in Batmobiles or soaring over it with rocket packs.

In contrast, the characters in "Logan" live day by day and don't take proper care of themselves because they're depressed or overworked. The film's main settings are farmhouses, hotel rooms, motel rooms, convenience stores, and the front seats of vehicles. Logan looks like hell, drinks to numb his pain, and is so disheveled that you can imagine what he must smell like. And yet I didn't find the movie to be depressing at all, just more real than I expected. Not fake-real, as in "edgy." I mean really real. As in "drama." It's filled with people like the people you actually know, or have known. They just happen to have superpowers.

The film's attitude toward the aspirational or escapist kind of comic isn't condescending, though. "Logan" integrates that kind of comic into the fabric of the story, as a form of illustrated mythology experienced by Laura, who badly needs something like that in her life. Logan sees through the exaggeration of her comics and tells her that even when parts of those stories are true, there's a lot more that's made up or exaggerated.
At the same time, however, all through the film Logan is constantly shown rejecting the pleas of Xavier and Laura to rise to the level of his own best self—and you think about that in relation to the comics Laura reads, you see that the film is commenting (subtly and with humility) on the idea of comics as inspirational texts, allegories that have a totemic power similar to narratives found in religion, mythology, or self-help books. Truth, justice and the American way. With great power comes great responsibility. Et cetera.

The movie draws a connecting line from the "real" world of "Logan," dirty and despairing and often dull as it can be, and the more hopeful world of the pre-graphic-novel type of comic. Then it draws a third connecting line to the Western, the genre that most inspired the filmmakers here. Not for nothing is "Logan" built around references to "Shane. But it's a much more complex work than "Shane." (Almost everything is.) You could say it's simultaneously about how necessary "Shane" is and how nobody can actually be Shane.

Beyond that, "Logan" is the first emotionally credible and recognizably real-world superhero picture to come along since "Unbreakable"—which was made eight years before the paradigm-revising "Iron Man," and which therefore doesn't feel like a superhero movie in the contemporary sense of the phrase. It feels like an M. Night Shyamalan film, which is really what I want from a superhero movie, and from any movie. Films like "Unbreakable" and "Logan"—and for that matter, the exceedingly odd "The Hulk" and "Superman Returns," which were rejected by mass audiences—feel like real auteur statements, of a sort that the Marvel and DC "expanded universe" model can no longer permit unless it runs on TV, where the variety of available moods and styles is more wide ranging, and the financial stakes are less dire. ("Legion," "Jessica Jones" and "Luke Cage" have so much more personality than almost any theatrical film released by Marvel or DC that it seems unsporting to put them side by side—but that's a subject for a whole other piece.)

I liked the intimacy of the film. There are no gigantic hovercrafts crashing into buildings, no world-destroying plasma cannons hovering over cities. The universe is not at stake. The future of humankind is at stake, yes, but not right this second. Laura represents the future of the mutants, but we don't know exactly what that will mean in the long-term, and whatever it means, it's not as important to us as what Laura means to Logan and what Logan means to Laura and what Xavier means to both of them.

During some scenes towards the middle of the film, they really do feel like a family. It's as if a daughter, he father and her grandfather are traveling together. That lie that Xavier tells to the family that invites them to dinner isn't really a lie. This is another way in which "Logan" rings true. The relationship configurations you create to replace traditional families are often stronger and more nurturing than traditional families, because you chose them, you committed to them.

There's a lot going on in this film, to put it mildly. It and "Get Out" are proving that it is still possible to make mainstream genre films that are principled, multilayered and distinctive, and still have large numbers of people be interested in paying to see them in a theater.

Which is not, of course, the same thing as saying that the film is going to please everybody. I saw "Logan" on a Saturday night in Bay Ridge. There was some grumbling as the final credits rolled. One audience member yelled "That was bullshit!" at the screen. A young woman said angrily to her date, "How could they just kill him? What the hell is that? That's not an ending." I chalked this up to Marvel and DC conditioning audiences not to want a movie that leaves them feeling melancholy or uneasy, thinking about their own regrets and mistakes and what they're going to do between now and when they die. But it was still disheartening.

But I also understand that this is not a universal reaction—that the Cinemascore for the film is good, and a lot of people like it. I hope viewers talk it up enough to give the film some legs at the box office, and make works like "Logan" as attractive to studios as the latest widget. I'd like to see more superhero movies like "Logan." Real movies, not movie-flavored product. Movies that show you fantastic individuals engaged in recognizable struggles while holding up a mirror to the audience and insisting they take a good, long look.

[jo]

Another piece of deep reflection which I have posted elsewhere but should probably also join the list of official reviews --

Please read this inspired writing on the meaning of LOGAN -- written by someone from Mumbai, India but now based in NYC and LA!


I found it among James Mangold's tweets --

Mangold‏
Verified account
 @mang0ld 7h
7 hours ago

A dear friend sent this. Thought I'd share. Author is locked in on the work we did. I'm so happy people get it...

birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/03/05/logan-the-things-we-leave-behind



LOGAN: The Things We Leave Behind

Getting rid of the guns in the valley.

By Siddhant Adlakha Mar. 05, 2017



Spoilers to follow.

Twelve years from where we stand, mutants are no longer born and America is a scorching hellscape for the few that remain. The only sensible recourse, as the Gods of irony would have it, is to escape back to Canada where it all began. But Logan wants no part of a new community. He moonlights as a limo driver to save up enough money to live out at sea, where neither he nor his ailing mentor can cause people harm, away from the world the X-Men failed to preserve. He may have Caliban and Xavier in tow, invalids whose powers involve tracking down any mutants the world has left – a last-ditch effort at community – but to him their function is merely to help each other live out their final days.

Logan is truly alone.

Maybe he prefers it that way. In all the years we’ve seen him and in every changing timeline, death followed in his footsteps. His father, when he was a child in X-Men Origins. Scott Summers. Jean Grey. Soon enough, everyone else. He’s seen every war recognizable to the Western world, and was even at the epicenter of its atomic cruelty. Now death is inescapable. Even his rideshare job has him working at funerals when he isn’t slashing up violent carjackers. Most of all, he’s tired, and the adamantium bullet he carries is both a reminder of his past and the point beyond which he can’t see a future. It’s what took his original memories from him. It may as well take these new ones, the weight of two divergent stories that only he and Charles remember. They've seen it all, they've done it all, and it's still led them to misery. A bullet doesn't sound so bad. 

Violence is the fabric of America in 2029. Logan’s white passengers party in apathy, some even chanting “U! S! A!” as they cross borders freely, while all the other characters he comes into contact with experience some form of despair. A black family on a farm fends off the encroaching heartlessness of corporate-hired goons trying to push them out by cutting off their water. A Mexican nurse begs for Logan’s help to escape the authorities, hoping to flee to Canada with her daughter. Logan was written before Flint came to light, before the Dakota Pipeline protests, before the refugee crisis hit its zenith, and before the threatening promises of this new administration, but it isn’t some magical prophecy. It’s a marker of where we’ve always been headed, our sins and our hatred never confronted; merely swept under the rug.

The X-Men movies always dabbled in the language and aesthetics of homophobia and racism, but rarely did they confront the roots of prejudice. The mutants died out because of the people who hated them, and now these same people – after poisoning their water, their drinks, the very food they consume – contort and twist the last of mutant blood to re-create them as they see fit: Passive. Controllable. A model minority.

One such experiment robbed of her childhood is X-23/Laura, made from the blood of Logan himself. The quiet type unlike her mouthy father, who drops F-bombs galore like his aged professor. This world is no longer sanitized, and for the likes of Laura, it’s been traumatic and abusive for as long as she’s been alive. She’s Logan, but denied the element of choice. Forced to kill to survive, and without the guidance of a figure like Charles Xavier, who’s spent the last seventeen years up on our screens, telling kids on the peripheries they’ll be okay. That they can be more. That they’re worthy of love and family. But now even Charles can’t fulfill his promise, residing in a drum that functions as an anti-Cerebro, suppressing the powers that once helped him heal through understanding. Now his powers only bring pain.


But Logan is not the dour film this setup would indicate. It is undoubtedly a film about lonely and morose people, and a violent one to boot, but it’s about the good these people do in their final days. More importantly, it’s about how they’re pushed to do it. How they find the things and people that make life worth living again, no matter how briefly, and it’s about reaching into the darkness of their pasts and finding a light worth sharing. It’s about the things that birthed us and made us who we are – the pain, the trauma, the unforgiving ugliness that we inflict on each other and on ourselves – but it’s also about where we go from there.
It’s about not becoming what they made you.

Logan was once kind of a hero. Once kind of a good guy, who went on adventures. Once kind of a father, who helped Rogue find safety, and guided her towards finding herself. Now he’s a myth. A shell of himself. A drifter without a purpose. The Wolverine exists in the pages of comics, but Logan struggles to retain that heroism. The world has given up on all those like him. He’s giving up on it in return. As Priscilla articulates, this dysfunctional family is all he has left. Even his good deeds result in the death of a family far more idyllic than his. While taking his final breath, a decent man holds Logan accountable.

On the other side of this equation is a family without love or empathy: Donald Pierce, Zander Rice, and their abominable creation. Rice and his Reavers hope to return Laura and her misfit friends to a status quo of imprisonment, finally deploying the latest “intellectual property” in their inhumane arsenal. X-24 is a perfect clone of The Wolverine, and a dark mirror for a wandering Logan. He is what Logan will become once he sheds his humanity; a rage-filled killer with allegiance to no one. He is the alternative to caring about the world once more. The promise of becoming what he was created for.

Pierce, Rice and X-24 chase Logan for the entire runtime; the possibility of an uncaring, unfeeling existence catching up to him like a phantom. A state of being he must outrun. The impulse for each step towards North Dakota is learning to care more about Laura, even if it's to help her reach a sanctuary he knows he will not find. The presence of X-Men comics in the film is more than just a wink to the audience. It not only creates a rift between Wolverine, the myth, and Logan, the flesh & blood, but it provides these dehumanized youths with a means of escape, both literal and metaphorical, like a portal to the innocence they were denied.

The “Eden” in this world’s X-Men comics no longer exists. It may never have existed, and yet its fictional locale becomes the meeting point for these kids before their escape. To them, it's real. It always was, and it represents hope – the kind Logan needs desperately to recognize. It’s perhaps the only hope that Laura has, and the only one she will ever have so long as Logan turns his back on the world. And like a self-fulfilling prophecy, these beautiful, gifted children of all sorts of ethnicities make real a storybook safehaven, building a microcosm of a better, kinder, more inclusive world through the lessons they learn from fiction.

When these kids lived with boots at their necks, they turned to X-Men stories and to the myth of The Wolverine. But it wasn’t The Wolverine that saved them. He did eventually, towards the end of the film, but it was the promise on the page that helped them find the strength to embark on their journey. Stories were their saviour because they helped them save themselves.

The stories left behind by others help Laura locate her father, but they also help her understand him. Raised in isolation and with no way to relate to the people around her, it’s a glimpse of a Western (Shane, perhaps the first movie she's seen, and one that left a mark on Charles as a child) that helps her comprehend Logan’s struggle while helping her put words to her own.

“There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand that sticks.”
How do you live with your past? How do you live with the things you’ve done, and the things that were done to you? Where do you turn for solace when the world has let you down? How do you learn to be better? These are the questions at the heart of Logan, and it offers no easy answers. For some, it’s comics. For others, it’s movies. These stories can help guide us along, but what proves to be most powerful is witnessing someone finally learning to live with their decisions. A man who has no reason to see good in the world, fighting to see it for someone else's sake; a warrior finally at peace with what he leaves behind. The death, the pain, the trauma, the suffering – but also, inextinguishable light.


For Wolverine, it’s a daughter. It’s the next generation of children. Of mutants. Of X-Men. By diving in headfirst to get them to safety, a battle he’s certain to lose, Logan gives someone else a chance to win the battles he lost. To become more than he we was. To be better than he was. To not let the rage, the pain and the regret define her existence. And when he finally fights for her, bravely and unconditionally, James Mangold adds the most masterful touch amidst the bombastic action. Within the swirl of powers and bullets and punches, we are gifted a moment, just as Laura is, to see Logan as a hero once more, leaping to the aid of someone he can’t help but love. In that moment, the world stands still as a daughter finally sees the man she’s been searching for.
In return, she vanquishes the walking embodiment of Logan’s inhumanity, using the bullet he’d kept for himself. She saves him on two fronts, preventing a much more grizzly demise and giving him a chance to say goodbye, but she also becomes the very reason his death can finally have meaning. She is the reason the “X” on his grave makes sense – not because he used to be one of the X-Men, but because he became one again.


The dog tags, the samurai sword, the adventures on printed pages. These are all symbols of events we witnessed during this seventeen-year saga. Reminders of a series that was at once disappointing and iconic, much like its protagonist. But here, as this final chapter comes to a close, bringing with it the missing weight of all the death and prejudice that were once mere noise and colour, Logan and his final film appearance serve a far greater purpose. They remind us that no matter what’s come before, no matter the journey we’ve taken or the mistakes we’ve made or the things we deeply regret, there is still a way to move forward when our wounds refuse to heal. There is still a way to make the world better for someone who might need it.


There is still light to be left behind.

“Now you run on home to your mother, and tell her... tell her everything's all right. And there aren't any more guns in the valley.”

Related Product:
Shane (1953)

Jo