Logan

I decided to add a picture of a real wolverine to the top of the review as a joke, as if I had mistaken the character for the animal. Then I did a Google image search on "wolverine" and found almost nothing but pictures of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Seriously, I needed to scroll down a really long way to find this picture of the actual animal.

I walked out of Logan confused about its pacing. It bothered me and I didn't know why. Some parts seemed really draggy and I didn't understand what they were doing in the film. The plot did not unfold in the rhythms I had expected it to. Then I came home and saw another reviewer describe it as a Western. And as I look back now, with the understanding that it was paced like a Western, man, Logan was a fucking symphony.

I'm still not sure that I liked it. It was a great movie; I'm just not sure that I liked it. There was a lot of sadness and pain in this movie, and it all happened to characters I've become very fond of. These beloved characters were so sad for so long that by the end of the movie, I was sad too. A bad movie can't make you feel like that, but also, I had not been expecting to feel so sad tonight and the sadness put a little bit of a kink in my evening.

Here's a quick plot summary: in the near and dystopic future, Professor X is hiding in a derelict water tower in Mexico, suffering from super-mutant-dementia. Logan struggles to obtain adequate medication for the Professor, failing often. Logan is also quite ill and aging visibly, and his alcoholism has really spiraled out of control. Then plot things happen, forcing Logan and the Prof to throw their lot in with a little girl who is kind of like a Wolverinelet, driving her north across the US toward the promised safety of Canada. They are hotly pursued by the evil corporation that made her into a Wolverinelet.

Logan is rated R, and provides a vivid contrast to how PG-13 the violence in other superhero movies is.* The characters in a PG-13 movie may spend lots of time running around trying to shoot each other like it's a game, but no serious attention is paid to the awful damage a bullet can do to a human body. This movie pays attention to that. In great detail. Also, I think there were only two decapitations (I might have missed one, who can keep track?) but in both cases the props or post-production people made sure to add the detail of the severed head's eyes rolling back right at the moment the head hits the ground.† I don't know if real severed heads do that, but man, it was really gross and disturbing.

THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH HAS A SPOILER IN IT

Anyway, Logan is a movie in which terrible things constantly happen to people's bodies, but the emotional violence has also been ramped up to match. When other movies show us Jackman's Logan, we understand that he has been harmed deeply, many times, and because of this he has a hard time trusting people enough to form relationships. He wants to be close to people, but he's bad at it, and this leaves him lonely. But just as other X-Men movies show us characters getting shot but spare us the details of what a person looks like with their face blown off, so other X-Men movies, while they show us a sometimes tormented Logan, don't really invite us down into the bleak and impoverished despair-hole that is his torment. Don't worry. This movie takes you down there, and it does so with such aplomb that by the time you're done watching Logan fight back tears as he buries Professor Xavier's lifeless body in a shallow grave, you, like Logan, will feel terribly sad.

ALL RIGHT NO MORE SPOILERS FROM NOW ON

Here's another measure of how different this R-rated film is from its PG-13 predecessors: the characters curse at each other all the time. I could have done with less of that. Not because I'm offended by profanity, but because I know these characters, I'm familiar with them, and hearing them say shit and fuck makes them sound less like themselves.

I wish I had liked Logan more than, if I'm honest, I really did like it.  It had so much going for it. Three incredibly solid performances at the heart of the film, including one from quite a small child. Beautiful cinematography. A few wistful nuggets of deeply felt compassion and kindness, and a sweet and fragile ray of hope at the end. Eh, I don't know. Maybe I went in with the wrong expectations. In the end, it was an exquisitely crafted work of art that kind of bummed me out. What can you do?

*Deadpool was different. The violence, while R-rated, still had a cheerful and cartoonish rhythm, and it never happened to characters we already knew from other movies.

†I almost typed, "the severed head's eyes rolling back in its head" before I realized that putting it that way isn't quite right. You can't be talking about a severed head and then refer to its head. No distinction is necessary; all it has is a head.