We like our heroes to be ageless. We want to think that they’ll be here forever. And in the comic books, that’s mostly true.

But Logan, which opens March 3, forces X-Men fans to see their most beloved mutant at his most fragile as he confronts a world without heroes.

If Deadpool reinvented what a superhero movie could be – ultra-violent, irreverent and hilarious – then Logan takes the genre to the next level.

Star Hugh Jackman isn’t just giving us the definitive X-Men movie; it could just be the definitive comic book movie.

Logan is dark, very violent and uncompromising. Loosely adapted from Mark Millar’s comic book storyline Old Man Logan, it plays a lot like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven – try as he might, the adamantium-clawed mutant can’t change who he is.

Now a pill-popping drunk in the year 2029 (a world not unlike the one we’re living in), Logan is a limo driver hiding out along the Mexican border looking to score enough cash to sail away into the sunset with his old mentor Professor Charles Xavier (Sir Patrick Stewart) and the mutant tracker Caliban (Stephen Merchant).

The X-Men are gone – there hasn’t been a new mutant in 25 years thanks to the villainous Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant).

So when a Mexican nurse approaches Logan for his help relocating a young girl to “Eden” in North Dakota, he rejects her. “I’m not who you think I am,” he gruffly states.

But like all westerns, you can’t leave the past behind, and when enough cash is dangled in front of his nose, Logan sees a way out and agrees to take the girl who, coincidentally, possesses the same mutant powers he does.

X-23, aka Laura (Dafne Keen), is the product of Rice and the biotech company Transigen, who have been creating mutants in a lab after virtually wiping them all out. They’ve been trying to turn the kids into weapons. But now that they’ve engineered a more ruthless hybrid, the X-24, they don’t need the kids. And they don’t need Laura.

Transigen’s head of security Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) is dispatched to kill Laura and anyone that gets in his way.

Logan doesn’t want to get involved, but he’s drawn back into a fight between good and evil, mostly at the behest of Charles, who, with his brain labelled “a weapon of mass destruction,” is now borderline senile and requires drugs to stop earth-shattering seizures.

To say more, would venture into spoiler territory.

What we can say is, working from his own story director James Mangold (The Wolverine) manages to alternate between scenes of frenetic action and quiet repose with ease. But make no mistake; the violence is of the hard-R variety. There’s plenty of blood, with heads and various other body parts torn asunder. And where Deadpool took its foot off the pedal with the character’s humour, Logan is unrelentingly bleak. Longtime fans are going to love and appreciate this approach to the character but casual comic book moviegoers might find it hard to stomach.

Where are the jokes? Where are the ‘Bubs’? Where is the CGI? We’ve been conditioned to expect those beats in superhero movies and Logan offers little of that.

Mangold’s tight shots on Logan’s battered face serve as a reminder that we’ve seen this hero grow from a smart-alecky scene-stealer in 2000’s X-Men to the battered warrior in this, Jackman’s ninth film.

Time has a way of roughening us all out; making us reconcile the dream of who we wanted to be and the reality of who we actually became.

All of us have to face that sooner or later, and so should our heroes.

Twitter: @markhdaniell

MDaniell@postmedia.com