Nerds That Geek Movie Review: 'Logan'

Written by Mike Cervantes

This review starts out with my usual disclaimer: I was a kid of the 90s and I really like the X-Men. There. It’s a statement I always stand by, even when it provides about 60% of the reason I ended up giving a good review to X-Men: Apocalypse, seeing as that movie could not have possibly cast a net wider than the odyssey-like backstories of the original comic. In this case, I’m about to let you in on my personal opinion that, in my book, Wolverine goes right alongside Batman as one of comicdom’s most versatile characters.

Anyone who thinks of ol’ Logan as the gritty maverick loner of the comics we’re familiar with might be overlooking his original run in the late ‘70s, where he’d take on characters like The Hulk. His shtick at the time: he wore a yellow suit and was a Canadian. Deal with it. Then there are all his turns as a character on family friendly versions of the mutant mini-saga, like Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, and the Pryde of the X-Men pilot. I’d go as far to say his central role in the 90s X-Men animated TV series is more well-known than any version of the character as he exists in the comics.

This movie’s permutation of Wolverine was inspired by a 2008 Marvel Comics mini-series entitled Old Man Logan, which takes place in the post-apocalypse. Already, the film abandons this more lofty presence to illustrate an aged and dying Wolverine that exists several years in his own future. After an admittedly poorly explained event which killed nearly all of mutant kind, Logan has found a hiding place on the US/Mexico border, where he lives alongside the albino mutant Caliban (Stephen Merchant), and a senile and heavily medicated Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart).

Having understandably lost all sight of Xavier’s grand design, the man once called Wolverine is laying low and attempting not to draw any further attention to himself, but his intentions go awry when a woman named Gabriella (Elizabeth Rodriguez) introduces her to a little girl named Laura (Dafne Keen), who turns out to be a clone from Logan’s DNA fashioned by an underground genetics lab. It becomes up to Logan and Professor X to lead this girl to a mutant sanctuary code-named Eden, as they’re all the while chased by the secret lab’s robot-armed security honcho Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook).

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Clearly, at this point, you can tell that this is intended to be a road film; albeit one that has connections to a well-established film franchise. It is…what most of us comic nerds pine for: stories about superhumans modeled after Australian mustelids that are simply living their lives. Logan knows that he still appreciates Xavier enough to protect him, but seems to have forgotten why, and Charles remains the sole moral center of his life despite his fading physical and mental health. Then there’s the presence of Laura, every bit the deviant, hard edged, and even violent type-a personality that Logan is, and the possibility that he could accept this random government-made clone of himself as a daughter.

Everything you’d expect from those aforementioned road films is in place, along with the necessary break for violent fight sequences that you naturally anticipate from a film about Wolverine. This one gets a hard R rating because, hey, it worked for Deadpool, but aside from the violence and the random F-bomb, the overall action doesn’t seem at all out of place for the character. Themes include several instances of right-to-live concepts, overtones of illegal immigration, the want to be accepted in simplistic terms despite being…well…a mutant, and the ability for a marginalized individual, like the young mutant in this story, to still be able to be given some sort of hope towards living a normal life. It’s amazing that this film is able to hit on all the same themes as the previous big budget X-Films without the city-monument destroying fights, or the need to shoehorn in a pointless second act as in Apocalypse.

It’s not a perfect film, mind you. There are some issues with having Boyd Holbrook as the most central baddie, as he often comes off as more grating than actually deadly. They make a bid to bring in another villain, played by Richard E. Grant, midway through the second act, but even that character isn’t well established enough to add to the malice-void. When Logan instructs his violent female protégé to attack a villain “you know when,” that “when” being unironically in the middle of a classical evil villain monologue, it becomes painfully obvious that the opposition in this movie is an afterthought to all of the cool road picture set-pieces they wanted to do.

After so many years of this comic-book film renaissance we’ve been having since, well, the first X-Men movie, there have been many analyses of films, and we’ve determined many different reasons why the best films in the genre seem to work. Logan is unique, though, since it manages to be an incredible film about the character of Wolverine without actually having to do much in terms of creating the overall spectacle. Like Unbreakable and Hancock, it is a movie about superhero-versus-self, and unlike those two previous attempts, it doesn’t SUCK!  

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